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1DI1ING LIST APR 1 1922,

MODERN PHILOLOGY

THE UNIVERSITY OP OHIO AGO PRESS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON

THE MARUZEN-KABUSfflKI-KAISHA

TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO, FUKUOKA, BENDAI

THE MISSION BOOK COMPANY

SHANGHAI

»'

MODERN PHILOLOGY

EDITED BY

JOHN M. MANLY, General Editor
CHARLES R. BASKERVILL, Managing Editor

WILLIAM A. NITZE STAKE W. CUTTING TOM PEETE CROSS

KARL PIETSCH FEANCIS A. WOOD GEORGE W. SHESBUBN

GEORGE T. NORTHUP JAMES R. HULBEBT JEFFERSON B. FLETCHER

T. ATKINSON JENKINS EBNEST H. WILKINS

ADVISOBY BOAED

JAMES W. BRIGHT GEORGE L. KITTREDGE

GEORGE HEMPL FREDERICK M. WARREN

FEEDEEIC I. CAEPENTEB

VOLUME EIGHTEEN
1920-1921

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

M7
v.lt

* % \ Published

May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December, 1920
January, February, March, April, 1921

Composed and Printed By

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago, Illinois. U.S.A.

CONTENTS

A. LEROY ANDREWS. Studies in the Fornaldarsogur Nordrlanda . 93
CHARLES READ BASKERVILL. The Genesis of Spenser's Queen of

Faerie 49

JACOB N. BEAM. Hermann Kirchner's Sapientia Solomonis . . . 101
ARTHUR C. L. BROWN. The Grail and the English Sir Perceval 201 and 661

W. F. BRYAN. The Midland Present Plural Indicative Ending -e(n) . 457

FREDERICK A. G. COWPER. The New Manuscript of Ilk et Gderon . 601

TOM PEETE CROSS. Alfred Tennyson as a Celticist .... 485

. "The Psalter of the Pig," an Irish Legend .... 443

STARR WILLARD CUTTING. Calvin Thomas, 1854-1919 . . .119

. A Hitherto Unpublished Poem by Friedrich von Schiller . 343

MARIO ESPOSITO. A Ninth-Century Astronomical Treatise . . 177

EDWIN W. FAY. Professor Prokosch on the IE. Sonant Aspirates . 109
M. B. FINCH AND E. ALLISON PEERS. Walpole's Relations with

Voltaire 189

R. S. FORSYTHE. A Plautine Source of The Merry Wives of Windsor . 401

THORNTON S. GRAVES. Richard Rawlidge on London Playhouses . 41

. Some Allusions to Richard Tarleton . . . . . . 493

JAMES HOLLY HANFORD. The Arrangement and Dates of Milton's

Sonnets . . 475

GEORGE R. HAVENS. The Abbe* Le Blanc and English Literature . 423

HAROLD N. HILLEBRAND. The Early History of the Chapel Royal . 233

A. R. HOHLFELD. Pact and Wager in Goethe's Faust .... 513
J. R. HULBERT. The Problems of Authorship and Date of Wynnere

and Wastoure 31

JOHN S. KENYON. On the Date of The Owl and the Nightingale . . 55

W. KURRELMEYER. Niflant, Iflant 557

H. CARRINGTON LANCASTER. La Calpren£de Dramatist . 121 and 345

SAMUEL MOORE. New Life-Records of Chaucer. Addendum . . 497

GEORGE TYLER NORTHUP. Caballo de Ginebra 157

ALOIS RICHARD NYKL. Old Spanish Girgonga 597

K. PIETSCH. The Madrid Manuscript of the Spanish Grail

Fragments . 147 and 591

JOHND. REA. Longfellow's "Nature" .48

. A Note on Romeo and Juliet, II, i, 1-2 675

EDITH RICKERT. A New Interpretation of The Parlement of Foules . 1

F. SCHOENEMANN. Friedrich Lienhards Literaturbetrachtung . . 545

vi CONTENTS

»
JOHN WILLIAM SCROLL. The Cave Scene in Die Familie Schroffen-

stein 537

MARTIN SCHUTZE. The Fundamental Ideas in Herder's

Thought 65 and 289

J. E. SHAW. "And the Evening and the Morning Were One Day" . 569

E. S. SHELDON. Some Roland Emendations 143

JOHN S. P. TATLOCK. The Epilog of Chaucer's Troilus . . .625
GUSTAVE L. VAN RoosBROECK. Corneille's Early Friends and Sur-
roundings *. 361

HERMANN J. WEIGAND. Heine's Return to God 309

RALPH C. WILLIAMS. Epic Unity as Discussed by Sixteenth-Century

Critics in Italy 383

STANLEY J. WILLIAMS. Some Versions of Timon of Athens on the

Stage 269

FRANCIS A. WOOD. Germanic w-Gemination . . . . 79 and 303

REVIEWS AND NOTICES:

Allason: Caroline Schlegel, Studio sul Romanticismo Tedesco

(T. P. Cross) 678

Aron: Traces of Matriarchy in Germanic Hero-Lore (T. P. Cross) 679
Babbitt: Rosseau and Romanticism (E. Preston Dargan) . . 162
Bayfield: A Study of Shakespeare's Versification (John S. P.

Tatlock) 504

Brown: A Register of Middle English Didactic and Religious

Verse. Part II (J.M.M.) 287

Burnham, ed. : A Classical Technology (Charles H. Beeson) » 623

Carre*: Goethe en Angleterre (T. P. Cross) 678

Cohen: ficrivains franc, ais en Hollande dans la premiere moitie*

du XVII' siecle (T. P. Cross) 680

Crane: Italian Social Customs in the Sixteenth Century and Their

Influence on the Literatures of Europe (William A. Nitze) . 609
Cross: The History of Henry Fielding (T. P. Cross) ... 677
Gollancz, ed.: A Good Short Debate between Winner and Waster

(J. R. Hulbert) 499

Grandgent: Old and New, Sundry Papers (T. P. Cross) . . 231
Gue*rard: French Civilization from Its Origins to the Close of the

Middle Ages (William A. Nitze) 609

Hayens: TheodorFontane: A Critical Study (Harvey W. Thayer) 561
Hewitt: Paul Gerhardt as a Hymn Writer and His Influence on

English Hymnody (T. P. Cross) . . . . . . .678

Hoare: A Short Italian Dictionary (Ernest H. Wilkins) . . 623
Jones: Lewis Theobald. His Contribution to English Scholar-
ship (George Sherburn) 57

CONTENTS

Leuvensche Bijdragen op het Gebied van de Germaansche Phi-

lologie en in 't bijzonder van de Nederlandsche Dialectkunde

(T. P. Cross) 679

Moore: Historical Outlines of English Phonology and Middle

English Grammar (J. R. H.) 63

Moore and Knott: The Elements of Old English (J. R. H.) . 63

Osgood, ed.: The Pearl (J. R. Hulbert) 499

Pinger: Laurence Sterne and Goethe (T. P. Cross) . . . 678
Recent Works on Phases of the English Renaissance (C. R.

Baskervill) 505

Revue de LittSrature Compared (T. P. Cross) 680

Riddell: Flaubert and Maupassant: A Literary Relationship

(George R. Havens) 617

Rodriguez y Marin, ed.: El Diablo Cojuelo, Luis Ve*lez de Guevara

(E. R. Sims) 620

Rudwin: The Origin of the German Carnival Comedy (Louise

Mallinckrodt Kueffner) 565

Schofield: Mythical Bards and the Life of William Wallace (T. P.

Cross) 229

Simmons: Goethe's Lyric Poems in English Translation Prior to

1860 (0. W. Long) 677

Simons: Waltharius en de Walthersage (T. P. Cross) 680

Weston: From Ritual to Romance (T. P. Cross) . 679

Winkler: Franzosische Dichter des Mittelalters: II. Marie de

France (Foster E. Guyer) 171

Wright: French Classicism (William A. Nitze) . • 609

Modern Philology

VOLUME XVIII

May IQ2O

NUMBER i

A NEW INTERPRETATION OF THE PARLEMENT
OF FOULES

PRESENT STATUS OF THE PROBLEM

It is with proper diffidence that I venture upon a battlefield so
hotly contested as the meaning of this poem. In 1877 Koch1 intro-
duced Anne of Bohemia as the "formel" and Richard II, William of
Hainaut (Bavaria), and Frederick of Meissen as the three eagle-
suitors. In 1910-11, Professor 0. F. Emerson, with the assistance of
Dr. Samuel Moore, threw out William of Hainaut (Bavaria), pushed
Frederick of Meissen into second place, and introduced as a formid-
able rival of King Richard, his adversary of France,2 Charles VI.
This revised hypothesis, according to Dr. Moore, "rests upon grounds
of proof that come little short of amounting to a demonstration."3
But in 1913 Professor Manly4 challenged the right of these historic
figures to be in the poem at all, and after showing up the cracks in
their armor, knocked them off their pedestals as unworthy to bear
a part in its interpretation. In 1914 Professor Emerson5 tried to
set them up again, with a few more props. In 1916 Mr. Hugo

1 Englische Studien, I, 287 ff., and Essays on Chaucer (Chaucer Society Publications) .
Part IV, pp. 400 ff.

* Mod. Phil., VIII, 45 ff.; Mod. Lang. Notes, XXVI, 8ff., 109 ff.

3 /&*<*., XXVI, 12.

« Stud, zur eng. Phil., Heft L, pp. 279 ff.

« Journal of English and Germanic Philology, XIII, 566 ff.
1] 1 [MoDBBN PHILOLOGY, May, 1920

2 EDITH RICKERT

Lange1 in a short paper argued further for the Koch-Emerson
theory. In 1917 Mr. W. E. Farnham2 entered the field, maintaining
that while it might not be necessary to banish these historical per-
sonages altogether, as Professor Manly would do, they must be kept
strictly in the background, as the poem could be interpreted perfectly
well without them.

In 1918 Mr. Viktor Langhans3 published an interpretation of
the poem as an exposition of the nature of love, designed for St.
Valentine's Day.

In this intensified polarity of opinion I venture to present a study
of my own begun many years ago and left unfinished because of the
inaccessibility of foreign libraries, and published now because it
suggests a new line of investigation.

COMPARISON WITH II Paradiso degli Alberti

In the first place, Giovanni da Prato's II Paradiso degli Alberti,
translated by Mr. Farnham, does not parallel or explain The Parle-
ment of Foules in its lack of definite ending, as will be seen by detailed
comparison :

PARLEMENT OF FOULES PARADISO DEGLI ALBERTI4

There are three suitors, the first There are four suitors of equal
admittedly of higher rank and rank and merit,
greater attractions.

All the characters are allegorized All the characters are human
as birds, the leading persons as except the heroine, who has been
eagles. enchanted into a sparrow hawk.

The first suitor claims most The first suitor sees the bird
ardent love, the second longest drowning and calls out, the second
service, the third greatest faithful- saves her, the third admires her
ness. beauty, cherishes her in his bosom,

and says that she must be well
cared for, and the fourth disen-
chants her.

i Anglia, XL, 395 fl. 2 PM LA, XXV, 492 ff.

8 Untersuchungen zu Chaucer, pp. 19 ff.

« This is based upon Mr. Farnham's translation; I have not seen the original.

A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES"

PARLEMENT OF FOULES

To settle the argument, Nature,
who presides over the parliament of
birds assembled to choose mates,
allows each class to appoint a
spokesman to voice their opinion as
to the merits of the three suitors.

The tercelet of the falcon and
Nature herself (who says that she
speaks for Reason also) support the
claim of the first eagle; the others
are not supported.

The representatives of the three
classes of common birds discuss
what the first eagle shall do if the
formel does not take him, and are
unmercifully jeered at by the noble
birds.

The formel, although the plea of
the first eagle has made her blush
like a rose, refuses to decide, asks a
year's "respit," and then her "choys
al fre."

PARADISO DEGLI ALBERT!

To settle the dispute, an old
peasant suggests that it be referred
to Jove.

Saturn, Mars, Apollo, and Mer-
cury— each in turn argues for one
of the four lovers; Venus and
Minerva leave the choice to the
girl.

The heroine chooses at once, and
the gods attend the wedding; but
the audience is left to guess which
suitor wins.

It is clear that the Paradiso is merely an example of the demande
d 'amours, the very point of which was to leave the ending unknown,
so as to arouse discussion in the audience. Unquestionably Chaucer
had in mind this literary type1 in the central situation of The Parle-
ment of Foules, but in no other demande d 'amours, as far as I have
been able to observe, has the balance of the argument been com-
pletely upset by throwing all the stress on the first suitor, and the
problem shifted from Which will she choose? to Why does she
not choose the first ? And in no other demande d' amours is the love
problem intertwined2 as here with satire on the common birds, who ;
do not agree with the "foules of ravyne" about the match but are I
willing that the first suitor should marry someone else. What will

1 Cf. Manly, loc. cit., pp. 283 flf.

2 Cf. 11. 491-518 and 554-616.

4 EDITH RICKERT

•

explain this absolute twist of the poem from the type to which it
belongs ?

Such a variation might be due to artistic purpose; but no critic
has attempted to explain the purpose here. Langhans indeed main-
tains that the general aim of the poem — to contrast pure love1 with
lawless love — shuts out the possibility of historical interpretation;
but he does not touch upon the problem suggested above — the use
of the demande dj amours with the balance of the argument entirely
toward one of the suitors.

POLITICAL ALLEGORY AND COURT POETRY

The problem, then, reduces to this: If the type of source upon
which the poem is based fails to explain this peculiarity, what grounds
have we for supposing that the clue lies in a historical interpretation ?

We have, for one thing, the common use of bird and beast allegory
by Deschamps and Machaut. Deschamps expected the French
court to understand his frequent allusions to prominent persons as
birds or animals.2

Moreover, Deschamps wrote an elaborate bird allegory (La
Fiction de I'aigle), satirizing the court of Charles VI, in which he
represents the young king as an eagle, one of his uncles as a falcon,
the nobility as the "gentle birds," the upstart courtiers as various
kinds of common birds, and so on.3

Machaut in Le Dit de Valerian (before 1350) uses bird allegory
in a love poem, disguising four women as eagles and falcons.4

It was the fashion in court poetry of the fourteenth century,
as may be illustrated abundantly from the works of Machaut,

1 Op. dt.; from pp. 36 and 40 wedded love would be inferred.

2 In accordance with fable lore, he uses both the eagle and the lion as symbols for
different kings of Prance, especially Charles V and Charles VI. At other times he
draws upon heraldry, as in referring to Richard II as the Leopard, and to Charles VI
as the Wing6d Deer. And again he has in mind the famous allegorical prophecies in
using the Heavy Ass (I'dne pesant) for Richard II, and the Wild Boar for the Black
Prince.

In the use of the Fox for Charles the Bad of Navarre and of Tybert, the Cat, for
John of Gaunt, the satirical intent is obvious.

For numerous political references in the form of animal allegory, see the Index to
Deschamps (GSuvres, SociSte" des Anciens Textes Francais, Vol. X); and for the extensive
use of birds and animals in political prophecy see Rupert Taylor's The Political Prophecy
in England.

> Op. cit., VI, 147 ff. The poem may be a little later than The Parlement of Foules,
but it belongs to the beginning of Charles VI's reign.

* Ed. Hoepffner (Society des Anciens Textes Francais), II, 239 ff.

A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 5

Deschamps, Gower, and Chaucer himself, to refer to and discuss,
directly and indirectly, political situations and personal affairs of
princes.

OBJECTIONS TO THE RICHARD-ANNE THEORY

Although Professor Manly has shown that the Richard-Anne
theory is untenable, and has discussed the contradictions and
absurdities involved in trying to date and motivate the poem on
this basis, the later articles of Emerson1 and Lange make further
attack necessary.

In this paper I shall try to add to the argument that the Richard-
Anne theory must be discarded by showing that (1) it does not
explain Chaucer's divergence from the demande d'amours type or
the inconclusive ending; (2) it does not explain the interweaving of
satire — a bird House of Commons — with the love story; (3) it is not
at present supported by historical evidence.

1. In the long history of the Richard-Anne theory2 only two
explanations have been offered for the formel's denial of the suitor
favored by Nature, Reason, and herself. One is Emerson's sugges-
tion of maiden coyness,3 which is scarcely argument. The other is

1 The chief new points introduced in Emerson's latest paper (Jour, of Eng. and
Germ. Phil., XIII) are the following: (1) He offers The Book of the Duchess as a parallel
for the year's delay (pp. 570 f.). But surely "another year" need not mean "next year at
the same time." The text says merely that after enduring his woe a long time the
lover plucked up courage to try again at some later time. As Professor Emerson notes,
the Duchess had refused him flatly, with no suggestion of asking for "respit." (2) He
offers Dunbar's The Thistle and the Rose (ibid., pp. 580 f.) as a parallel for the omission
in the Parlement of all reference to the marriage. But why should we suppose that
Dunbar, who wrote in May while the marriage arrangements were being made, should
have waited until August to present his poem ? Would he not have sent it at once in
the season that suggested the form it took ? Certainly no argument can be based upon
the circumstances under which it was presented, as these are unknown. (3) He, indeed,
admits that he cannot explain satisfactorily why Chaucer did not develop his poem
to a more definite conclusion, but he seems to find comfort in the fact that the birds
themselves are content with the conclusion (ibid., pp. 578f). This is merely saying that
Chaucer as an artist had his own reasons for the inconclusive ending; it is not an argu-
ment for the use of the poem upon an occasion connected with a wedding.

2 For the most detailed summary of its development, see Langhans, op. cit., pp.
48 ff.

*Loc. cit., pp. 573 f. If a this-is-so-sudden Victorian convention prevailed in the
fourteenth century, Anne must have blushed with shame — if the poem was translated
to her — upon remembering how she had joined with her mother and brother in authoriz-
ing negotiations for the marriage, and how, without a hint of irresolution on her part, it
had been settled in England and in Bohemia, delayed only by the time required for the
journeys of the ambassadors, so that she was on her way to England within nine months
and married within the year after formal negotiations had begun. What a blow to her
maidenly modesty if the behavior of the formel was correct!

6 EDITH RICKERT

Lange's assertion that Chaucer deliberately departs from the facts
in order to avoid a tactless reference to Anne's quick acceptance
of Richard's offer, which the King of France had refused — in other
words, to save her imperial dignity!1

2. The satirical element, one-seventh of the poem, the Richard-
Anne theory does not attempt to explain.

3. If, in addition, it can be shown that the balance of historical
evidence swings even slightly toward the conclusion that Frederick
of Meissen was out of the race by 1377, or that Charles VI was
never in it at all, then more props must be found if the theory is to
be maintained. But in fact the evidence is strongly against both
these suitors.

FREDERICK OF MEISSEN

In the case of Frederick, Professor Emerson's chief argument is
that as the money pledged for the fulfilment of the contract between
Frederick and Anne had not been paid by 1397, which is indicated
by Frederick's seizure of the towns of Briix and Laun, offered as
security for the payment, the engagement, therefore, must have
lasted until 1382, when it was nullified by Anne's marriage to
Richard.2

The seizure of the towns proves one thing only, that the forfeit
money had not then been paid. It tells nothing whatever about
the date or the circumstances of the breaking of the contract.

According to Pelzel, as Professor Emerson admits, the engage-
ment was arbitrarily broken by Anne's relatives about 1377, on
account of the Mainz affair. We do not know the authority for
Pelzel's statement, but Lindner accepts it; and surely Professor
Emerson's opinion that there was not reason enough for breaking
the engagement is no argument that it was not broken. Until

1 Loc. cit., pp. 395 f. But to argue a certain historical basis for the poem because
of resemblances, and then to confirm this argument by a purely subjective explanation
of admitted disagreement between the historic facts and the details of the poem is a
curious logic.

Lange's other contribution to the theory — his suggestion that the formel is Anne
because the two-headed eagle of the Empire is on her tomb in Westminster Abbey must
have occurred to many students of the theory; but it does not work. The eagle-suitors
were not sons of the Empire, nor was the formel double-headed! If the allegory were
heraldic, it would have been impossible to get away from the leopards of England and
the lilies of France.

2 Mod. Phil., VIII. 49 ff.

A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 7

Pelzel is discredited by substantial evidence to the contrary, his
statement, based upon sources to which we have not access, must
outweigh an unsupported assumption that the contract of which,
Pelzel and Lindner discounted, we know nothing after 1373, continued
to exist until Anne's marriage to Richard.1

CHARLES VI OF FRANCE

Professor Emerson's identification of Charles VI as the third
suitor depends upon (1) a passage in Valois; (2) an extract from a
letter written by the Cardinal de Sortenac; (3, 4) two passages in
Froissart; and (5) a passage in Adam of Usk's Chronicle.2

1. The quotation from Valois reads in full (italics mine):

Let us note, however, a last hope, or rather, a last illusion, entertained at
this moment by some Clementists. During a visit of Wenzel at Aix-la-Chapelle
there was talk of a marriage between the dauphin, son of the king of France,
and Anna of Luxemburg, sister of the King of the Romans. An interview
was to take place between Charles V and Wenzel. Who could say whether
by virtue of the matrimonial conferences which were going to be undertaken
at Rheims another agreement might not come about in the religious domain ?
At the very worst it would suffice (at least they chose to believe so) to persuade
Wenzel that a change of policy would not be incompatible with the respect
that he owed the memory of Charles IV [his father]. The Court of Avignon
counted much on the result of that conference. Among other persons who
promised to be there, I shall mention the envoys of the King of Portugal
and at their head the Bishop of Lisbon, who was already preparing the
discourse with which he meant to convert Wenzel.

This interview did not take place; the King of the Romans, turning his
back upon Rheims, resumed his route to Cologne. He, it is true, had him-
self represented at Paris by four ambassadors; but the document, un-
doubtedly prepared in advance, of which they were bearers, treated only of
the renewal of the alliance between the two houses, without whispering a
word of the marriage of the dauphin with Anne of Bohemia. Too deep a
difference of opinion separated thenceforth the Valois and the Luxemburgs.
Anna was going to be betrothed not to the son but to the hereditary foe of
Charles V, to Richard II, King of England. A marriage should seal the
accord of the two great Urbanist kingdoms.

1 Particularly in an age when such contracts were made with one hand and broken
with the other. Lange's assertion (italics mine): "In oiler munde war ja auch das
langj&hrige verldbnis Annas mit Friedrich von Meissen, das zur Zeit ihres 'engagement' mit
Richard II formel uberhaupt noch nicht gelost war" (loc. cit., p. 396) is sheer imagination.

* Mod. Phil., VIII, 51 ff.

8 EDITH RICKEBT

It was all over: it was useless to dream longer of an agreement on the
question of the schism between France and Germany.1

The italicized phrases show unmistakably that, in the opinion
of Valois, the talk grew out of a desperate effort on the part of the
Clementists to win Wenzel for their pope, and that even this hope
was dead when the old treaty between the Empire and France was
renewed at Paris2 without a word about the marriage.8

2. The letter from the Clementist Cardinal de Sortenac, written
in May or June, 1380,4 was evidently one of Valois' authorities, and
therefore is not additional testimony.

3. But Professor Emerson quotes a passage from Froissart to
show that Charles V on his deathbed in September, 1380, still had
hopes of a marriage between his son and Anne. The King is speak-
ing: "Seek in Germany for the marriage of Charles my son, by
which alliances there may be stronger. You have heard how our
adversary must and will marry there: it is all to have more
alliances."5

1 "Notons cependant une derniSre esperance, ou plutdt une derniere illusion, entretenue
a ce moment par quelques cUmentins, Durant un sej'our de Wenceslas a Aix-la-Chapelle,
on avail parle d'un mariage entre le dauphin, fils du roi de Prance, et Anna de Luxem-
bourg, soeur du roi des Remains. Une entrevue devait avoir lieu entre Charles V et
Wenceslas. Qui pouvait dire si, a la faveur des pourparlers matrimoniaux qui allaient
s'engager a Reims, un autre rapprochement ne s'opSrerait pas sur le terrain religieux ?
Au bout du compte il sufflsait (du mains on se plaisait A le croire) de persuader a Wen-
ceslas qu'un changement de politique n'gtait pas inconciliable avec le respect du a la
m&noire de Charles IV. La cour d' Avignon comptait beaucoup sur le resultat de cette
conference. Entre autres personnages qui promettaient de s'y rendre, je citerai les
envoyes du roi de Portugal et, a leur t§te, I'6v6que de Lisbonne, qui d6ja prgparait le
discours avec lequel il devait convertir Wenceslas.

"Cette entrevue n'eut pas lieu: le roi des Remains, tournant le dos a Reims, reprit
la route de Cologne. II se fit, il est vrai, repr&senter a Paris par quatre ambassadeurs:
mais 1'acte, sans doute r6dig6 d'avance, dont ces derniers Staient porteurs ne traitait
que du renouvellement des alliances entre les deux maisons, sans souffler mot du mariage
du dauphin avec la bohSmienne Anna. Un trop profond dissentiment sSparait d6sor-
mais les Valois et les Luxembourg. Anna allait 6tre fiancee non pas au flls, mais a
1'ennemi hergditaire de Charles V, a Richard II, roi d'Angleterre. Un mariage devait
sceller 1'accord des deux grands royaumes urbanistes.

"C'en 6tait fait: il ne f allait plus songer a une entente sur la question du schisme
entre la France et 1'Allemagne" (La France et le grand schisme d' accident [1896], I, 300 f.).

2 Dated in another hand July 21, 1380 (Valois, op. cit., p. 301, n. 1).

• Professor Emerson's inferences are somewhat confusing: He says first (Mod.
Phil, VIII, 52 f.): "As late as that time, therefore [April, 1380], the emperor was still
considering the possible betrothal of his sister Anne and the heir of the French throne";
and later (ibid., p. 57): "As already shown, it was in the spring of 1380 that there had
first been talk of a marriage of Anne and the Dauphin of France" (italics mine).

* Valois, op. cit., I, 319, n. 1.

6 "EnquerSs pour le mariage de Charle mon fll en Allemaigne, par quoi les aliances
y soient plus fortes. Vous av6s entendu comment nostre aversaire s'i doit et voelt
maryer: ce est tout pour avoir plus 1' alliances" (ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, IX, 285).

A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 9

That Froissart, however, did not think Charles V referred to Anne
is shown by what he wrote later in connection with the marriage of
Charles VI to Isabel of Bavaria :

For King Charles of France, of blessed memory, on his deathbed had
ordained that Charles his son should be settled and married, if place could
be found for him in Germany, in order that the Germans might make closer
alliances with the French, for he saw that the King of England was going to
be married to the sister of the King of Germany, in order that he might be
stronger.1

The second passage does not quote Charles V but interprets his
words as Froissart understood them. It may be objected that his ,
interpretation is colored by the fait accompli of the marriage; but
interval evidence in the speech bears him out: Charles V could not
have used the word seek (Enqueres) in Germany if he himself had for j
some time been working or hoping for a particular alliance there.
Moreover, the second sentence in the first quotation was superfluous t 3
unless it meant exactly what Froissart in the second passage says
it meant, that Charles V was anxious that his son should make a
match that would offset (by maintaining balance of power) that of
Richard to Anne, which he evidently foresaw.2 Compare also the
expression "if a place could be found for him in Germany" with the
purely general "and marry him in a place so high that the realm
shall be stronger."8

If Charles V ever made any effort to court Anne for his son,
evidence of it has yet to be produced.4

1 "Car 1 i rois Charles de France, de bonne m&noire, ou lit de la mort, avoit ordonnS
que Charles ses flls fust assegnSs et mariSs, se on en pooit veoir lieu pour luy en Alemaigne,
par quoy des Alemans plus grans aliances se fesissent as Francois, car il veoit que li rois
d'Engletiere estoit maries a le soeur dou roy d'Allemaigne, dont il valoit mieux" (ibid.,
X, 344. Italics mine).

2 The religious alliance of England and Bohemia initiated by the decision of the
parliament of Gloucester in 1378 continued with the letter of Wenzel to Richard, May 20,

1379. The idea of the marriage may have originated in the spring of 1379 when Michael
de la Pole seems to have been sent to Wenzel's court to discuss it. Certainly the Cardinal
de Prata, who was sent by Pope Urban to Wenzel in 1379, and who went on to England
in 1380, was concerned with that alliance; and Burley, who went to Bohemia in June,

1380, went with a definite proposition. For detailed discussion of the negotiations
between England and Bohemia at this time, see C. G. Chamberlayne, Die Heirat Rich-
ards II von England mil Anna von Luxemburg (Halle, 1906), especially pp. 19 ff.; and
J. J. Heeren, Do* Bundniss zwischen Kdnig Richard II von England und Kdnig Wenzel
von Jahre 1381 (Halle, 1910), pp. 16 ff.

» This, according to Froissart, was also said by Charles V on his deathbed (op. cit.,
IX, 285).

« The initiative in renewing the old treaty, even, came from Wenzel.

10 EDITH RICKERT

4. The active courtship, then, to which Professor Emerson refers,
must have been conducted, if at all, by Charles VI himself after he
came to the throne in September, 1380. On this point Professor
Emerson again uses Froissart as authority. In order to make the
objections to his inference clear I quote the passage in full:

So were these affairs conducted that the King of the Romans sent his
sister to England, the Duke of Tassem in her company, and a great train
of knights and squires, of dames and damsels, in state and array, as befitted
such a lady; and they came to Brabant, to the city of Brussels. There the
Duke, Wenceslas of Brabant, and the Duchess, Jeanne his wife, received
the young lady and her train with great splendor; for the Duke was her
uncle: she was the daughter of the Emperor Charles, his brother. And so
Madame Anne of Bohemia remained at Brussels with her uncle and her
fair aunt for more than a month without leaving; she did not dare budge —

f I will tell you the reason why. She and her council were informed that there
were about XII armed vessels full of Normans on the sea, hovering between
Calais and Holland, and robbing and pillaging on the sea everything that

\ they met, without regard for anyone; and a rumor ran up and down the sea-
coast of Flanders and of Zeeland that they remained there waiting for the
arrival of the young lady, and that the King of France and his council were
going to have the lady carried off to break this marriage; for they were in
great fear of alliances between the Germans and the English. And people
said furthermore, when they were talking, that it was not honorable to seize
or to carry off ladies in the wars of lords; but the answer made to color
and make look better the quarrel of the King of France, was: "How is it
you do not remember that the Prince of Wales, father of the present king
of England, had carried off — and agreed to the deed — Madame de Bourbon,
mother of the queen of France, who was seized and taken away by the
prince's people, and all through that war was in the castle of Belle-Perce ?
God help me, it was so; and she was taken to Guienne and ransomed. Now
in a similar case, if the French, by way of revenge, should seize the wife of
the King of England, they would not be wronging anyone."

Because of these doubts and the general look of affairs, the lady and
all her train stayed at Brussels a whole month and until the Duke of Brabant,
her uncle, sent to France his councillors, the Signeur de Rocelare and the
Signeur de Bouquehort, to remonstrate about these things with the King
of France and his uncles, who were nephews of the Duke of Brabant, being
his sister's sons. These knights of Brabant so managed, and talked so well
to the King of France and his council, that favor was shown them, and
good safe-conducts were given to pass where they [Anne and her train]
pleased — they and theirs — were it within the realm of France or along
the frontier in going to Calais; and the Normans who were out at sea

A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 11

were called home. All this the above-mentioned knights of Brabant reported
to the Duke and to the Duchess; and the King and his uncles wrote them
that at their request and in consideration of them and of no other, they
[the French king and his uncles] had shown this favor to their cousin of
Bohemia.1

Here we must distinguish between fact and rumor. Froissart
states as facts the report about the Norman pirates, Anne's fear,
the embassy to Paris to get safe-conducts, and the reply of Charles
and his uncles. There is no reason to doubt any of this. Froissart
was in a position to know what went on at Brussels,2 and no motive
for such an elaborate invention appears. Moreover, it is a fact that
on October 15, the Emperor Wenzel issued a commission to the Duke
of Teschen to go to Paris to announce the marriage of Anne, and to
offer the Emperor's services in prolonging the truce or in making

1 "Tant avoient est€ ces coses demerges que li rois des Rommains envoioit sa soer
en Engletiere, li due de Tassem en sa compaignie et grant fuisson de chevaliers et d'es-
cuiers, de dames et de damoiselles en estat et en arroy, enssi comme a tel dame apparte-
noit; et vinrent en Braibant en le ville de Brousselles. La requelliefent li dus Wincelins
de Braibant et la ducoise Jehane sa fern me la jone dame et sa compaignie moult grande-
ment, car li dus en estoit oncles: elle avoit este1 fille de le'mpereur Charle son fr&re. Et
se tint madame Anne de Behaigne §, Brousselles dalles son oncle et sa belle ante plus
d'un mois sans partir, ne bougier, ne s'osoit, je vous diray raison pour quoy. Elle fu
segnefye, et ses consaulx, que il y avoit environ XII vaissaulx armes plains de Normans
sus la mer, qui waucroient entre Callais et Hollandes, et pilloient et desreuboient
sus le mer tout ce que il trouvoient, et n'avoient cure sur qui; et alloit et couroit
renommee sus les bondes de celle mer de Flandres et de Zellandes que il se tenoient
la en attendant la venue de la jone dame, et que li rois de France et ses consaulx voloient
faire ravir la dame pour brisier che mariage; car il se doubtoient grandement des alliances
des Allemans et des Engles. Et dissoit-on encores avant, quant on parloit, que ce n'estoit
pas honnerable cose de prendre, ne de ravir dames en guerres de signeurs, mSs on re-
spondoit en coulourant et en faissant le querelle douroy de France plus belle: 'Comment
ne veistes-vous pas que li princes de Galles, peres de che roy d'EngletiSre, que il fist ravir
et consenty le fait de madame de Bourbonnois, m6re §, la royne de France, qui fu prise
et embKJe des gens dou princes, et tout de celle guerre, ens ou castiel de Belle-Perce ?
M'aist Dieu, si fu, et men6e ent en Gienne et ranc.onn6e. Ossi par pareille cose, se li
Francois, pour eux contrevengier, prendoient le moullier dou roy d'Engletiere, il ne fe-
roient a nulluy tort.'

"Pour ces doubtes et les apparans que on en veoit, se tint la dame et toute sa route
a Brouselles un mois tout entier, et tant que li dus de Braibant ses oncles envoya en
France son conseil le signeur de Rocelare et le signeur de Bouquehort pour remonstrer
ces coses au roy de France et a ses oncles, liquel estoient ossi neveut dou due de Braibant
et fils de sa soer. Oil chevalier de Braibant exploiti&rent tant, et si bellement parlfcrent
au roy de France et a son conseil, que grace li fu faite et bons sauf-conduis donn&s de
passer oft il li plaissoit, li et les siens, fust parmy le roiaulme de France ou sus les fronti&res
en allant jusques a Callais, et furent li Normant qui se tenoient sus mer, remanded.
Tout che raporterent li dessus dit chevalier en Braibant au due et S, la ducoise et leur
escripsoient li rois et si oncle que, §, leur pryere et contemplation et non d'autrui, il
faissoient celle grace a leur cousine de Behaigne" (ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, IX,
459 fl. Italics mine).

2 The Duke of Brabant was his patron and friend. He claims to have been "moult
privS et acointe" with him (ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, I, 246 ff.) ; and at this time Frois-
sart lived at Lestines-sur-Mont, within easy riding distance of Brussels.

12 EDITH RICKERT

peace between France and England.1 Of this journey we have no
details, but it may well have been partly responsible for Anne's long
stay at Brussels.

Again, it is easy to see the basis of the report that frightened
Anne. For four successive summers (1377-80) a French fleet under
the admiral Jean de Vienne had raided the English coast and terror-
ized Channel traffic. In August, 1380, they even went up the
Thames and burned Gravesend, only a few miles from London.
This fleet was Norman in that its headquarters was at Rouen, and
it undoubtedly was manned largely by Normans.2 The only reason
why it was inactive in 1381 was that Charles V on his deathbed had
forced a truce with England by stopping supplies for war.3

For this reason if any Norman ships sailed from Rouen in 1381,
they were pirates. Further, during the Great Rebellion in England
that summer men were accused in London of taking money from
Vienne to facilitate his landing on the south coast. Though this
charge was almost certainly false — Vienne had no money for such a
purpose — the report of it was enough to frighten Anne into asking
for safe conduct.4

But the clauses italicized are used by Froissart to distinguish
between fact and rumor. The rumor of the kidnaping plan evidently
grew out of the well-known French fear of the alliance of the two
great Urbanist kingdoms.5 That the rumor was unfounded scarcely
needs argument. To kidnap Anne meant war with England and

1 E. Winkelmann, Acta Imperil Inedita Seculi XIII et XIV (1880, 1885), II, 641 f.
It would seem as if he should have asked for the passports. Is he the "autrui" of the
last sentence in the Froissart passage ?

2 Terrier de Loray, Jean de Vienne (1877), chaps, v-vii, with documents referred to.
The Rolls of Parliament confirm this. In 1379, the Commons complained of the great
harm done by "barges et balyngers de Normandie et autres ennemys sur la mier."

3 Cf. Mandements de Charles V, 1955.

* Cf. Oman, The Great Revolt of 1S81 (1906), p. 140, with n. 3, and Petit-Dutaillis,
Introduction to R6ville's Soulevement des Travailleurs d' Angleterre (1898), LVIII, n. 2.
That Anne was kept informed about the insurrection appears from the Town and Port
Records of New Romney, which say that the men of that town who sent a barge to
bring the Queen across began their preparations in October, "and the Queen (at this
time) did not come to England, nor did she wish to come until peace should be made
again of the rebels aforesaid" (Archaeol. Cant., XIII, 209). This might of course have
been true, quite apart from any plans of Jean de Vienne, as all through the autumn the
English government was harassed by rumors that rebellion was about to break out again
(Oman, op. cit., p. 148).

5 See the words of Charles V quoted on pp. 8 f . above.

A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 13

Bohemia, and the French war chest was empty.1 But Professor
Emerson observes that mere talk of Charles's courtship might have
given him a place in the poem. Is it conceivable that if such talk
existed it would not at once have associated itself with the rumor
quoted by Froissart and served to motivate it? Why should the
gossips have gone back to the old case of the dowager Duchess of
Bourbon, who was kidnaped for ransom, not "to break a marriage,"
if it was generally believed that the French King was a disappointed
suitor of Anne ? And if it was not true, or even generally believed,
how should Chaucer have heard of it, and why should he have made
Charles the third suitor ?2

5. There is, however, one plain assertion that Anne was courted
by the King of France. It is quoted by Professor Emerson from
the Chronicle of Adam of Usk. If Adam was right, he had a "scoop" !
It is fair to ask how he got it. The source is suggested by the
passage in which the statement occurs:

In this same year there came into England one Pileus, cardinal priest of
Saint Praxedes, to treat, on behalf of the emperor of Germany and king of
Bohemia, with the council of England of and about a marriage between
our king and the lady Ann, sister of the same emperor; who afterwards
became thereby our most gracious queen, howbeit she died without issue.
At his coming, this cardinal, falsely feigning himself legate a latere and as
having the power of the pope, then did exercise the papal offices. And
among other things he made me notary, though to no purpose, in the house
of the friars preachers of London, where he was then dwelling. Thus did
he gather to himself countless money, and, the treaty of marriage being
settled, he departed from England with his gains, to his own condemnation;
idly trusting that the pope would approve these his acts. And, after his
departure, the said lady Ann was bought for a great price by our lord the
king, for she was much sought in marriage by the king of France; and she
was then sent over into England to be crowned queen.3

1 See p. 12 above. In this connection should be noted the conciliatory attitude of
the French when in the spring of 1381 Wenzel threatened on religious grounds to break
the old alliance renewed in 1380 (Valois, op. cit., II, 274 fl.).

2 Cf . also Chamberlayne's argument, loc. cit.

8 "Isto eodem anno, venit quidam in Angliam diet us Pilius, tituli Sancte Praxedis
presbiter cardinalis, ad tractandum cum concilio Anglie, ex parte imperatoris Almanie,
regis Boemie, de et super matrimonio inter regem nostrum predictum et dominam
Annam, dicti imperatoris sororem, postea ex eo capite Anglie reginam benignissimam.
licet sine prole defunct am. Ineundo cardinalis iste, false se fingens legatum a latere esse
ac potestatem pape habere, vices papales tune excercuit; me inter cetera notarium tune,
licet inutiliter, in domo fratrum predicacionis Londonie, ubi tune morabatur, creavit.
Inflnitam pecuniam sic collegit, et ab Anglia cum eadem pecunia, eodem tractatu

14 EDITH RICKERT

Before examining this passage, it is necessary to observe that by
his own assertion Adam is known to have written from memory
all of his chronicle before the year 1394,1 and also that a reference
under the year 1382 to an event of the year 14142 shows that in the
case of Prata his memory was going back thirty-two years. This
fact alone discredits his statements sufficiently. But what was the
source of his idea ?

It is clear from the passage quoted that he had personal relations
with Prata, which resulted in a bitter sense of having been cheated.
We can infer almost with certainty what had happened. Adam
tells us that Prata had made him "notary." It cannot be doubted
that he means "papal notary/'3 and that the appointment was
either not confirmed or was later canceled. Now Prata was the famous
turncoat of the age, and when he went over to Clement VII in 1386
Adam would certainly have lost his office.4 But between 1378 and
1380 Prata was the chief rounder-up of the Urbanist forces, traveling
from country to country;5 and if anyone was likely to hear of the
Clementist "illusion" of the spring of 1380 he was the man. Thus
it might easily have reached Adam at the time of their personal
association.6

I But in any case the unsupported assertion of a thoroughly unre-
'i liable witness,7 made confessedly from memory thirty-two years
after the event, is scarcely convincing evidence of the activity of
Charles VI as a suitor for Anne. The case, then, reduces to the desper-
ate hope of some of the Clementists in the spring of 1380. Further,

matrimonii expedite, ad sui recessit dampnacionem; credens tamen, licet in vanum,
facta sua hujusmodi per papam ratiflcari. Post cujus recessum, dicta domina Anna, per
domimim regem magno precio redempta, quia a rege Francie in uxorem affectata, in
Angliam et Anglie reginam transmittitur coronanda" (Chronicon Adae de Usk, 1S77-1421
[ed. Maunde Thompson, 1904], pp. 2 f.).

1 Chronicon Adae de Usk, 1877-1481 (ed Maunde Thompson, 1904), p. 8.

2 Ibid., p. 4.

» Cf. Du Cange, s.v. Notarii Apostolici.

* Prata may have been playing a double game for some time. Urban suspected
him in 1385 (cf. Valois, op. cit., II, 118, n. 2).

5 He was in England in 1380 (cf. Rymer, Foedera, VII, 256).

• Sir Edward Maunde Thompson suggests (op. cit., p. 140, n. 1) that Adam's "scoop"
may have grown out of the Froissart rumor that the French king meant to kidnap Anne;
but in that case why should it have remained a "scoop" ?

f Note the continual corrections in the footnotes to Maunde Thompson's translation,
pp. 137 flf.

A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 15

it appears that, as Hofler1 suggests, not even they took the plan very
seriously. The truth was that as neither pope would agree to a
Church council2 the marriage of Anne with the Dauphin of France
was not a practicable way of ending the schism.

As the Richard-Anne theory, then, neither fits nor explains The
Parlement of Foules, and as the evidence submitted in support of
the identification of Frederick of Meissen and Charles VI of France
as the second and third suitors does not show that either of these
princes could have been regarded as Richard's rivals when he was
courting Anne,3 I conclude that if we are to have a historical expla-
nation of the poem, we must look elsewhere for it.

MARRIAGE PLANS FOR PHILIPPA OF LANCASTER

Such a situation suggests itself in 1381 in the three possibilities of
marriage associated with the name of Philippa of Lancaster, eldest
daughter of John of Gaunt. They involved: (1) her first cousin,
King Richard; (2) her second cousin, William of Hainaut (or
Bavaria) ; (3) John of Blois, one of the rival claimants to the duchy
of Brittany.

KING RICHARD

1. For the existence of the first plan a single passage in Froissart is
sole authority:

At that time there were great councils in England of the King's
uncles, the prelates, and the barons of the land for marrying the young
king Richard, and the English would have liked to see him married in

1 Anna von Luxemburg (Denkschr. der Kais. Acad. der Wisaensch. Phil.-Hist. Classe
1871), XX. 131. .

2 Valois, op. cit., I, 318 f.

3 An argument of which I have made no use is that of the order of precedence of the
suitors. It should be summed up if only because so much is made of the subject in the
poem itself.

Nature says that the "tercel egle" who is above the other birds "in degree" shall
choose his mate first, and after him the other birds "by order" (11. 379 fl.). Later, it is
made clear again that the first eagle is highest in rank (1. 552), and the second "of lower
kinde" (1. 450). Although nothing is said about the rank of the third eagle, it is impos-
sible for me to agree with Professor Emerson that this omission is intentional ambiguity
because of the anomalous position of Charles VI. As the birds are to speak in the
order of their rank, the third must be of "lower kinde" than the second. However
much Charles's title was challenged by the English, they could not have denied that by
the medieval theory of precedence, he was on three counts at least entitled to speak
before Frederick: he was the head of the House of Valois, he was a reigning king, and
he was older than the heir of Meissen. However much Richard hated his "adversary,"
he could not have been pleased by a subversion of court etiquette which placed his
second cousin after a younger prince of lower rank.

16 EDITH RICKERT

Hainaut for love of Good Queen Philippa, their lady, who had been to them
so kind, so generous, and so honorable, and who had been born in Hainaut;
but Duke Albert at that time had no daughter old enough to be married.
The Duke of Lancaster would have been glad to see the King his cousin take
the daughter that he had by Madame Blanche of Lancaster, his first wife;
but the country would by no means consent to it for two reasons: one was that the
lady was his cousin german and therefore too nearly related to him, and the
other that it was desired that the King should marry over seas in order to have
more alliances. So was put forward the sister of the young king Charles
[Wenzel] of Bohemia and Germany, daughter of the late emperor of Rome.
Of this opinion were all the councils of England. So was commissioned to
go into Germany and to treat for this marriage a very brave knight of the
King, who had been his tutor, and who had been very intimate with the
Prince of Wales, his father. This knight was called Sir Simon Burley, a
wise man and experienced in treaty-making. Sir Simon was granted every-
thing that was necessary for his mission, money, and other things; so he
left England and arrived at Calais, thence came to Gravelines and to Bruges,
and from Bruges to Ghent, and from Ghent to Brussels; and there he
found Duke Wenceslas of Brabant, and Duke Albert, the Count of Blois,
the Count of Saint-Pol, Sir Robert de Namur, Sir William de Namur, and
a great host of knights of Hainaut and of Brabant; for there was going on
a great fete of jousting and pleasure; and for this had all these lords
assembled. The Duke and Duchess of Brabant in honor of the King of
England received the knight very cordially, and when they knew the reason
why he was going into Germany, they were very glad and said that this
was a thing well undertaken between the King of England and their niece.
They delivered to Sir Simon Burley at his departure special letters addressed
to the iCing of Germany, declaring that they had great liking for this match.
So the knight left Brussels, and took the Louvain road on his way to Cologne.1

i " En celle saison eut grans consaulx en Engletierre des oncles don roy, des prelas
et des barons dou pals pour le jone roy Richart d'Engletierre maryer, et euissent volen-
tiers li Engles veu que il se fuist marygs en Haynau pour 1'amour de la bonne royne
Phelippe leur dame, qui leur fu si bonne, si large et si honnerable, qui avoit est6 de
Haynnau; mais li dus Aubiers en che tamps n'avoit nullo fllle en point pour marier.
Li dus de Lancastre euist volentiers veu que li rois ses cousins euist pris an fills que il eut
de madame Blance de Lancastre, sa premiere femme; mais li pats ne le voloit mies con-
sentir pour deus raisons: li une estoit que la dame estoit sa cousine giermainne, che par
quoy estoit trap grant proxsmete, et li autre que on voloit que li rois se mariast oultre le mer
pour avoir plus de aliances. Si fu mist avant la soer dou jone roy Charle [Wenzel] de
Boesme et d'Allemaigne, fille a I'empereur de Romme qui avoit est6. A tel avis se
tinrent tout li consaulx d'Engletierre. Si en fu cargies pour aller en Alemaigne et pour
tretier che mariage uns moult vaillans chevaliers dou roy, qui avoit estfi ses maistres et
fu toudis moult prochains dou prince de Galles son pSre. Si estoit nomm6s li chevaliers
messires Simons Burlg, sage homme et grant tretieur durement. Si fu a messire Simon
ordonne tout che que a li appartenoit, tant de mises comme de autres coses; si se parti
d'Engleterre et arriva a Calais, et de la vint-il a Gravelines et a Bruges, et de Bruges a
Gand, et de Gand a Brouselles, et la trouva le duck Wencelin de Braibant et le duck
Aubiert, le conte de Blois, le conte de Saint-Pol, messire Robert de Namur, messire

A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 17

In regard to this passage it must be granted that Froissart
could have obtained his information at first hand from either the
Duke of Brabant1 or Burley. It is patent that Froissart wrote
immediately after the event described. He knows all about the route
taken to Brussels and the fete there, but he leaves the envoys on
the road to Cologne without a hint as to what was the result of their
mission.2

The content of the first part of the paragraph is credible and to
some extent supported: that the English were devoted to Queen
Philippa and would have liked a Hainaut match for her sake; that
Albert of Bavaria had at this time no marriageable daughter; that
the English people were anxious for "aliances" abroad;3 and that if
the proposal was made the objection of consanguinity would certainly
have been raised.4

Froissart, presumably voicing Burley, does not say that a definite
plan for the marriage of the royal cousins was ever proposed in
Parliament and rejected; he merely expresses a general attitude on
the part of Lancaster and two clearly stated objections on the part
of the "country" — how made clear we are not told.

This ambition is in entire accord with all that we know of
Lancaster. It was an almost inevitable middle step between his early
attempts to divert the succession to his own line5 and his efforts in

Guillaume de Namur et grant fuisson de chevaliers de Haynnau et de Braibant; car 1&
avoit une grosse feste de joustes et de behourt: pour ce y estoient tout cil signeur asamble.
Li dus de Braibant et la dugoise rechurent, pour 1'onneur dou roy d'Engletierre, le cheva-
lier moult liement, et quant il sceurent la cause pour quoi il aloit en Allemaigne, sy en
furent tout resjoi et dissent que ce estoit une cose bien prise dou roy d'Engletierre et de
leur niSce. Si cargi&rent S, messire Simon Burl6 a son dSpartement lettres especiaulx
adrechans au roy d'Allemaigne, en remonstrant que il avoient grant affection en ce
mariage. Si se party de Brouselles li chevaliers, et prist le chemin de Louvain pour aler &
Coulongne" (ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, IX, 212 f. Italics mine).

1 See p. 11 above.

2 Froissart does not name the other envoys; but Burley was the leader of the
embassy, and the one in whom for personal reasons, the chronicler was interested.

» Witness the earlier marriage negotiations for Richard: with Visconti and twice
with his "adversary," the King of France.

4 As happened in 1394, when Gloucester wished Richard to marry his daughter
(Froissart, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, XV, 155).

* For an extreme statement, see Chronicon Angliae 1328-88 (Rolls ed.), pp. 92 f.
Cf. also Ramsay, The Genesis of Lancaster (1913), II, 55; Longmans, The Life and Times
of Edward III (1869), II, 255 f.; Trevelyan, England in the Age of Wycliffe (1900),
p. 28; but cf. Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt (1904), p. 130.

•
•

18 EDITH RICKEKT

; old age to assure the succession to his son.1 By marrying Philippa
to Richard he would gain for himself much more control over the
king and the succession for his line.

On these grounds it is practically certain that he desired the
match, highly probable that he worked for it, and equally probable
that the "country" — the middle and lower classes, who hated and
feared him as the leader of the feudal nobility2 — would have had
none of the plan. But knowing how often royal marriage negoti-
ations fell through, notably in the case of Richard, he might well have
entertained some hope of the alliance until the King was actually
married to another.3 And unless he had this ambition, why had he
allowed his eldest daughter to reach the mature age of twenty-one
unmarried ?

WILLIAM OF HAINAUT

2. In connection with the account of the marriage of William of
Hainaut with Marie of Burgundy in the spring of 1385, Froissart
relates an embassy from Lancaster to William's father, Duke
Albert, as follows (italics mine) :

The master of the wool staple of all England spoke first, showing his
credentials and uttering many compliments from the Duke of Lancaster
to his cousin Albert, and then speaking of many matters with which they
had been commissioned. Among other things he asked Duke Albert, as I
was informed at the time, whether it was his intent to persevere in this
marriage with the children4 of the Duke of Burgundy. At this word Duke

1 Hardyng declares that Lancaster had a chronicle forged to prove that Edmund
Crouchback, ancestor of his wife (Blanche), was the elder son of King Henry III and
King Edward I, the younger. This would give his son a claim to the throne through
the mother.

Hardyng says further that he had often heard the Earl of Northumberland declare
he had heard Lancaster ask in Parliament to be made Richard's heir, "consyderynge
howe the kynge was like to have no issue of his bodie" (Archaeologia, XX, n. 186).

Another chronicler (writing before 1471) reports that in 1390-91 Lancaster tried
to get Parliament to declare his son heir to the throne (An English Chronicle of the Reigns
of Richard I, Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VI [Camden Society, 1856], p. 7).

2 This is thoroughly established. The feeling was voiced in Piers Plowman, "Belling
the Cat." For its further bearing on the interpretation of The Parlement of Foules,
see p. 28 below.

* It is a curious coincidence that the very first business proposed in Parliament
after the King's wedding was Lancaster's demand for money to go to Portugal (Rolls
of ParL, III, 113 f.). The league with Portugal had been concluded at the very time
when Richard's marriage became a certainty; and immediately afterward Lancaster
turned his ambitions to Spain again. As soon as he could get money and men, he went
to the Peninsula and straightway married one daughter to the king of Portugal, the other
to the king of Castile.

* It was a double match: William's sister was married at the same time to the heir
of Burgundy.

A NEW INTERPKETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES

Albert changed color a little and said: "Yes, sir. By my faith! Why do
you ask?" "My lord," said he, "I speak of it because my lord, the Duke
of Lancaster, has aliyays hoped until now that Mademoiselle Philippa, his
daughter, would have my lord, your son." Then Duke Albert said: "Friend,
tell my cousin that when he has married or will marry his children, I will
not meddle with the matter. Nor has he any business to interfere about my
children — as to when I shall marry them, nor where, nor how, nor to
whom. " This was the reply which the English had at that time from Duke
Albert. This master of the wool staple and his companions took leave of
the Duke after dinner, and went to Valenciennes to spend the night, and
in the morning they returned to Ghent. Of them I shall say no more; I
believe that they returned to England.1

Here again Froissart seems to be on firm ground. The marriage
of William to Marie of Burgundy had been engineered by the Duchess
of Brabant, the widow of Froissart 's friend and patron.2 The elabo-
ration of detail, with conversations and explanations, shows that
the account came either from the Duchess herself or from someone
intimate with her, an eyewitness of the dinner scene, who noticed
the Duke's change of color.3

In this account there are two significant points: (1) even with his
change of color, which may have been due to either anger or embar-
rassment, Albert does not deny the compact; (2) the English speaker
uses the word always. Whether this is to be taken literally as
meaning "from birth," or refers to 1372, when Lancaster asked an

1 "Li maistres de 1'estaple des lainnes de toute Engleti&re parla premiers, quant
il ot monstr6 ses lettres de crSance, et recommanda moult grandement le due de Lan-
castre et son cousin le due Aubert, et puis parla de pluiseurs coses dont il estoient cargiet.
Entre les autres coses il demanda au due Aubert, sicom je fuy adont infourmgs, se ce
estoit se entente de perseverer en che mariage as enffans le due de Bourgongne. De
ceste parolle li dus Aubers mua un petit couleur et dist: 'Oil, sire. Par ma foy! pour-
quoi le demanded- vous ?' 'Monsigneur,' dist-il, ' j 'en parolle pour ce que monsigneur le
due de Lancastre d tousjours espSre jusques & chi que mademoiselle Phelippe sa fille
aroit Guillaume monsigneur vostre fil.' Lors dist li dus Aubers: 'Compains, dites a mon
cousin que quant il a mariet ou mariera ses enflans, que point je ne m'en ensonnieray.
Ossi ne s'a-il que faire d'ensonnyer de mes enffans, ne quant je les voel marier, ne ou,
ne comment, ne a qui.' Che fu la response que li Engles orent adont dou due Aubert.
Chil maistre de Testable et si compaignon prisent congiet au due apriSs disner, et s'en
vinrent jesir a Valenchiennes, et a 1'endemain il s'en retournerent a Gand. De eux je ne
say plus avant, je croy bien que il retournerent en Engletiere" (ed. Kervyn de Letten-
hove, X, 313 f.).

2 She twice mentions Lancaster's hope (op. cit., X, 307 flf.). She assures Albert,
"je say de verite."

* Froissart himself was not present. He is careful to say "sicom je fuy adont in-
form6s," and "je croy bien que il retournerent en EngletiSre"; but his very care to
distinguish between fact and conjecture strengthens belief in the narrative.

20 EDITH RICKERT

aid "pour nostre fille marier,"1 it is not important to determine.
The point is that in 1385 he claimed, uncontradicted by Albert, that
he had "always" hoped to marry his daughter to William. In that
case he entertained this hope in 1381, but undoubtedly with the
mental reservation that it would be forgotten if a better match
offered.2

JOHN OF BLOIS

3. The story of John of Blois, Froissart tells three times, in each
account stressing different details. It is worth while to place them
parallel :

ABC

It is true that at this

time these two lords,

John and Guy of Brit- And John of Brittany So was the said John

tany, who were chil- of Brittany

dren of Saint Charles

of Blois, and who were

prisoners in England

and shut up in a castle

in the keeping of Sir

John

d'Aubrecicourt, were was brought into the brought into the pres-

sent for and summoned presence of the King ence of the King and

fair and courteously and his uncles and the lords

by the council of the council,
King of England, and

1 John of Gaunt' s Register (Camden Society), I, No. 245 (April 22). Mr. Armitage-
Smith (op. dt., p. 214) thinks that this plea may have been merely an excuse to raise
money ; but it should be noted that Lancaster did not scruple to raise money simply
"in relief of his great necessities." This suggests a real basis for the other excuse. The
arrangement may have dated back to 1367, when Albert was in England (William being
two years old and Philippa seven).

William like Anne had had previous engagements. In fact he (more probably than
his brother Albert) was engaged to Anne herself from 1371 to 1373 (Pelzel, Lebensgesch.
des rdm. u. b8hm. Kais. Wenceslaus [1788], p. 110). Prom 1374 to 1377 he was con-
tracted to the French princess Marie (Devillers, Cartul. des Comtes de Hain. [1881], II,
218 ff.). But in the making and breaking of these royal marriages many diplomatic
threads were intertwined, which were acknowledged and disregarded according to the
policy of the moment. For instance, Richard himself seems to have negotiated for the
princess Marie while she was contracted to William. In any case, if Lancaster had had
an early understanding with Albert, even if only informal (cf. Froissart, "a tout le
mains on ly avoit fait et donng si entendre" [op. dt., X, 312]), he could have forgotten it
and neglected Albert's efforts to marry his son while his own schemes were looking in
other directions, and remembered it when it suited his purpose to do so.

2 The author of an anonymous French chronicle (MS 11139) says that William loved
the daughter of the Duke of Lancaster, but that the Duchess of Brabant prevented the
marriage (Froissart, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, X, 553 f.); but I am not basing any
argument upon this because from this statement I cannot tell whether or not the Chronicle
is derived from Froissart. The word "loved," indeed, suggests further information.

A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 21

it was said to them
that if they would take
as fief the duchy of
Brittany from the King
of England, and would
recognize him as king
in fealty and homage,
they would be restored
to their heritage,

and John the elder
should have in
marriage Madame
Philippa of Lancaster,
daughter of the Duke,
whom he had by the
duchess Blanche of
Lancaster. They
answered that they
would do nothing of
the sort, and that they
would remain good
Frenchmen if they had
to die in prison. Thus
the matter rested at
that point, and when
their firm resolve was
known, they were not
asked again.1

and it was said to him:
"John, if you will take
as fief the duchy of
Brittany and hold it of
the King of England,
you shall be freed from
prison and established
in the lordship of Brit-
tany,

and you shall be mar-
ried well and nobly in
this land," as would,
have happened, for the \
Duke of Lancaster i
wished to give him i
his daughter Philippa \
— she who was later \
queen of Portugal.
John of Brittany re-
plied that he would not
make this treaty, or
become hostile or op-
posed to the Crown of
France ; he would
gladly marry the
daughter of the Duke j
of Lancaster, but on {
condition that he '
should be freed from
England. Then he was
sent back to prison.2

and it was said to him
that he should be made
duke of Brittany and
that for

him should be recov-
ered all his heritage
of Brittany,

and he should have to
wife Madame Philippa
of Lancaster, daughter
of the Duke of Lan- ,
caster, but that he7
should be willing to hold
the duchy of Brittany
in fealty and homage
of the King of England,
which thing he would
not do. He was well
content to take in mar- ,
riage the lady daughter <
of the Duke, but that ^
he should take oath
against the Crown of
France, that he would
never do, even if he
should remain in prison
as long as he had been
there, and as long as
he lived they should

1 "Voirs est que en ce tamps chil doy signeur, Jehan et Guy de Bretaigne, qui furent
enfant 8, saint Charle de Blois, liquel estoient prisonnier en EngletiSre et enclos en un
castiel en la garde de messire Jehan d'Aubrecicourt, furent requis et appel!6 bellement
et doucement dou conseil dou roy d'EngletiSre, et leur fu dit que, se il voloient relever
la duc6 de Bretaigne dou roy d'Engletiere et recongnoistre en foy et en hommage dou
roy, on leur feroit recouvrer leur hiretage, et aroit Jehans li aisnes en mariage madame
Phelippe de Lancastre, fllle dou due que il eut de la ducoise Blance de Lancastre. II
respondirent que il n'en feroient riens, et que, pour morir en prison, il demoroient bon
Francois. Si demora la cose en eel estat, ne depuis, quant on sceut leur ferme entente,
il n'en furent point requis" (ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, IX, 462 f.).

2 "Et fut Jehan de Bretaigne amenS en la presence du roy et de ses oncles et du
conseil, et luy fut dit: 'Jehan, se vous vou!6s relever la duchie" de Bretaigne et tenir du
roy d'Angleterre, vous seres delivrS hors de prison et remis en la possession et seignourie
de Bretaigne, et sere's marie1 bien et haultement en ce pays,' sicomme il eust este\ car
le due de Lancastre luy vouloit donner sa fllle Phelippe, celle qui fut puis royne de Portingal.
Jehan de Bretaigne respond! que ja ne feroit ce traittiS, ne ne seroit ennemy, ne con-
traire §, la couronne de France; il prendroit bien a femme la fllle au due de Lancastre,
mais que il fust deiivre" d'Angleterre. Or fut-il remys en prison" (ibid., XII, 62 f.).

22 EDITH RICKERT

ABC

get nothing different
from him. When the
King and his council
saw this, they grew
cold in showing him
favor, and he was sent
away in the keeping of
Sir John d ' Aubreci-
court, as is told at
greater length here be-
low.1

Once more Froissart was in a peculiarly favorable position to
get facts at first hand. After the death of the Duke of Brabant
in 1383, he entered the service of Guy of Blois, cousin and nearest
kinsman of the very John of Blois in question.

The three versions of the offer in Froissart entirely agree in
essentials, but each has a different emphasis.

A gives a brief summary of the situation of John and Guy in
explaining how John de Montfort's wife (Richard's half-sister)
happened to be in England in 1382.

B, in explaining how the Constable Clisson had John of Blois
freed in 1387 and married him to his daughter, quotes the offer made
to him of the hand of Philippa and summarizes his reply.

C, in explaining the quarrel between Clisson and Montfort,
summarizes the offer, but gives in indirect quotation apparently the
very words of John's reply. It alone gives the significant detail
that afterward "they grew cold in showing favor to him," which
implies that for a time, however short, he was remanded from
prison.

A careful comparison of these three versions suggests strongly
that Froissart had a first-hand report of the scene at the council;

i "Si fut le dit Jehan de Bretaigne amene en la presence du roy et des seigneurs, et
luy fut dit que Ton le feroit due de Bretaigne, et luy seroit tout recouvre 1'eritaige de
Bretaigne, et aroit a f emme madame Phelippe de Lancastre, fille au due de Lancastre, mais
que la duche" de Bretaigne voulsist tenir en foy et hommaige et tout relever du roy
d'Angleterre, laquelle chose il ne voult faire. II estoit ass6s content de prendre par
mariage la dame fllle du due, mais que il eust jur6 centre la couronne de France, il ne
1'eust jamais fait pour demourer en prison autant comme il i avoit este, et au fort toute
sa vie n'en sceut-1'en avoir autre chose. Quant le roy et son conseil veyt ce, Ton se
reflroida de luy faire grace, et fut renvoi6 en la garde de messire Jehan d'Aubrecicourt,
ainsi que cy-dessus est plus au loing contenu" (ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, XII, 157).

A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 23

and it is difficult to see how this could have reached him except
through either Guy or John of Blois, or some one in their confidence.

It is noteworthy that in this very connection he states emphati-
cally that he is telling the exact truth, as his patron was anxious
that his history should not be colored by the hostility between the
houses of Blois and Montfort.1

The idea of marrying Philippa to John of Blois could scarcely
have arisen before January 15, 1381. At that date Montfort,
although he was married to Richard's half-sister, forsook the English
and returned to his allegiance to the French king. Lancaster as
generalissimo of the English army must have been immediately
informed of the defection of Montfort, but although the latter
signed a treaty with Charles VI on January 15, this was not ratified
by the Breton estates until April 10; whereupon the English army
sailed home.2 Only during the winter of 1381 could this plan have
been talked about, as it must have terminated abruptly with the
declaration of John that he would be asses content to marry Philippa
but that he would never renounce his allegiance to France.3

By St. Valentine's Day, 1381, it is altogether probable that all
three possibilities were in the mind of Lancaster. True, the ambas-
sadors of Wenzel were on their way, but no one knew with what
terms and conditions; there was still a chance that the negotiations
might come to nothing, as had happened in earlier attempts to
marry Richard to a foreign princess. If the Bohemian marriage
should be determined upon, there was still the old contract with
William of Hainaut; and there was the new project of making
John of Blois his son-in-law and of establishing him as duke of
Brittany, in order to hold that country in allegiance to England, and
especially to himself.4

i Ibid., XII, 154.

«76id., IX, 332 ff.; also Dom Morice, Hist, de Bretagne (1835), V, 297 ff.

8 Although we do not know the exact date of the council meeting, it would naturally
have taken place soon after the defection of Brittany was certain, that is, after April
10, 1381.

« There is a possible objection to St. Valentine's Day. If as De la Borderie says
(Hist, de Bretagne [1906], IV, 66) the English did not suspect Montfort's defection until
April 10, the marriage plan must have come after that date. But Montfort had been
vacillating in his allegiance to England ever since the death of Charles V (September,
1380). It is difficult to believe that his attitude was a secret to the initiated.

24 EDITH RICKERT

•

PHILIPPA AND THE FORMEL

How far does this historical situation fit and explain the poem ?
The suitability of Philippa of Lancaster to the part of the formel
needs no elaborate argument. About this time or very little later
she was mentioned by name in a poem by Deschamps1 as patroness
of the Order of the Flower. The compliments suggest a very at-
tractive woman :

Et qui vouldra avoir la congnoissance

Du tresdoulx nom que par oir congnoy

Et du pais ou est sa demourance

Voist en Tille d'Albyon en recoy,

En Lancastre le trouvera, ce croy.

P.H. et E.L.I.P.P.E. trace,

Assemble tout; ces. VIII. lettres compasse,

S'aras le nom de la fleur de valour,

Qui a gent corps, beaux yeux et douce face.

Au droit jugier je me tien a la flour.

L'ENVOY

Royne d'amours, de douce contenance,
Qui tout passez en senz et en honnour,
Plus qu'a fueille vous faiz obeissance:
A droit jugier je me tien a la flour.2

The identification of the first suitor as Richard remains, and the
complimentary nature of the description has been sufficiently pointed
out.3

The second suitor, if identified as William of Hainaut, was
certainly "of lower kinde" and had "served" Philippa longer —
"always," according to John of Gaunt's statement (see p. 19 above).4

But the most interesting point of agreement between the poem
and historic fact is in the case of the third suitor. Professor Emer-
son's efforts to establish half a year of courtship for Charles VI5

» Professor Kittredge says that the poem was written before, perhaps several years
before, 1386 (Mod. Phil., I, 4 f.).

2 (Euvres (SociSte des Anciens Textes Francais), IV, 260 f.

3 It is of course not impossible that the ardent, impulsive boy of fourteen may have
had a romantic affection for his cousin of twenty-one; but it is not necessary to suppose
so. A court poet of Chaucer's intelligence, would have had the tact to assume this
state of mind if he was complimenting the Princess.

4 He begins to say that he loves her better than the first suitor; then changes to
"Or atte leste I love hir as wel as ye" (11. 451-52). This is interesting in view of the state-
ment of the anonymous chronicler (see p. 20, n. 2, above) that William was in love with
Philippa.

» Mod. Phil., VIII, 58; and cf. Manly, loc. cit., p. 281, n. 1.

A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 25

are rendered needless by the fact that the text does not say that
he had courted the formel half a year. It reads:

Of long servyse avaunte I me no-thing
But as possible is me to dye to-day
For wo, as he that hath ben languisshyng
Thise twenty winter, and wel happen may
A man may serven bet and more to pay
In half a yere, al-though hit were no more
Than som man doth that hath served ful yore.

/ ne say not this by me,1 for I ne can

Do no servyse that may my lady plese;

But I dar seyn I am hir trewest man,

As to my dome, and feynest wolde hir ese;

At shorte wordes, til that deth me sese,

I wol ben hires, whether I wake or winke,

And trewe in al that herte may bethinke [11. 470-83].

The third suitor jeers at the idea of length of service as showing
devotion — hah0 a year will do as well as twenty. His figures are
merely for illustration. But, he continues, the argument does not
apply to himself, for he cannot do any service at all to please his
lady; for all that, he is her most loyal lover, and will remain faithful
until death. But why could he not serve her ? If he represents ,/'
John of Blois, obviously because he was in prison.2

If the known facts about the marriages discussed for Philippa
in 1381 are in harmony with the descriptions in The Parlement of
Foules* the next question to be considered is, How does the /\jl

1 Italics mine.

2 As he and his brother were hostages, they were of course treated like gentlemen.
John may have seen and had some acquaintance with Philippa — may even have been
attracted to her and still unwilling to relinquish his allegiance to the King of France
for her sake.

The match was not unsuitable for Philippa. The rival claimant to Brittany was
married to King Richard's half-sister. Another half-sister, Joan Courtney, married at
Easter, 1380, the Count of St. Pol, who had been captured in 1374 and had since that
time been a prisoner in England. And this was a love match based upon acquaintance.

» Two lines may need explanation: The tercelet of the falcon (11. 547 fif.) speaks of
the first suitor as "worthieste of knighthode, and longest hath used hit."

Richard was knighted in 1377. William of Hainaut was not knighted until he was
twenty (at the siege of Dam, 1385). John of Blois was much older. His parents were
married in 1337, and he was born between 1338 and 1345. He was at least forty years
old in 1381. But he had been in prison since 1356; there is no evidence that he had
been knighted then.

In the literal sense of the words, then, the lines fit; but I am inclined to think that
they are a mere complimentary generalization.

In reply to Professor Manly's objection that it is absurd to apply such description
to mere children, I should say that in Chaucer's tune these boys in their teens were

26 EDITH RICKERT

historical situation of Philippa and her father explain the inconclusive
ending of the poem? Politically speaking, Philippa was in danger
of being jilted for a foreign princess. Yet Richard was so much the
best match that she could not save her pride by immediately choosing
one of the other suitors. In such a complicated and irritating
position, the most delicate flattery would be the suggestion that,
with due appreciation of the merits of the royal suitor, the princess
was not yet ready to make up her mind. He might be pointed out
by Nature and Reason; his claim might be strongly urged by the
nobility; she could only ask for "respit"1 and — in view of the
extreme uncertainty of the outcome of Lancaster's schemes for his
daughter2 — her "choys al free."

In this interpretation the personal relationship of the royal
cousins, Richard and Philippa, plays no part.3 The poem is regarded
merely as a court poet's balm for the hurt pride of the prince for
whom on a more tragic occasion he wrote the Book of the Duchess.4

THE SATIRE

But what of the satire? One-seventh of the poem describes
a mock parliament in which the common birds discuss, not love in
general, not the formel's decision, but whether or not the first eagle
shall marry another if the formel will not have him. And in this
discussion every remark by one of these birds, with the striking
exception of the turtle-dove, is unmercifully ridiculed5 by the noble

regarded as men and played the parts of men. Henry IV had a son before he was sixteen,
Edward III before he was seventeen. The Black Prince was sixteen at CrScy; John of
Gaunt went to war at the age of ten. In Ipswich at this time boys were made citizens
at the age of twelve (Mrs. Green, Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, I, 184). The very
Richard to whom Professor Manly thinks this description unsuited only three months
later seems to have behaved like a man, in dealing with Wat Tyler's rebellion; but
cf. Dr. Kriehn's "Studies in the Sources of the Social Revolt in 1381," in the American
Historical Review, VII, 254 fl., 458 ff.

1 The year is a part of the bird convention; it means until the next mating season.

* They all fell through, and she married the King of Portugal in 1387.

» In 11. 433 ff . of the poem the formel seems to express personal preference, or at least
to be especially moved by the plea of the first eagle; but we know nothing of Philippa' s
attitude toward Richard. The formel's blush may be mere tribute to his charm.

4 Why was Lancaster's younger brother, the Earl of Cambridge, asked to put through
the negotiations for Richard's marriage with Anne when the senior uncle would naturally
have been expected to look after his nephew's affairs? Was Lancaster's objection to
the marriage so voiced that it was impossible or impolitic to ask him to undertake this
duty, or did he refuse it ?

5 As every reader will prefer to see these speeches in their context, no detailed analysis
of them is given here.

A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 27

birds. What has this situation to do with the conventional demande
d 'amours, or with the analysis of lawful and lawless love ?

The two questions to be answered are: Do the birds represent
men ? and, For whom was such a satire intended ?

That the birds represent classes of men is made practically
certain by the continual use of bird and beast allegory in all forms
of medieval thinking. In England as early as 1330 the preacher
Robert Holkot had allegorized as birds different classes of men.1
There is frequent reference to allegorical political satire in the
chronicles and elsewhere.2 Langland used it; Gower used it in his
Tripartite Chronicle; it appears in Richard the Redeless; Deschamps
is full of it, and his Fiction de I'aigle (cf. p. 4 above), which cannot
be much later than The Parlement of Foules, and for all we know
may be a little earlier, uses birds to satirize classes as well as to
represent individuals. In similar mood to Chaucer, if not imitative
of the allegory of the Parlement, is the later political satire:
The gees han mad a parlement,
Toward the eron [Henry IV] are they went.3

On this basis, then, the "foules of ravyne" are the nobility (as
in Holkot and commonly elsewhere), but identification of the classes
of men ridiculed as the goose, duck, and cuckoo is less certain. A
few points of characterization are, however, clearly pointed out.
They are divided into three classes : Water fowl, seed fowl, and worm
fowl, of which only the water fowl and worm fowl are ridiculed.
The turtle who is "vantparlour" for the seed fowl is a modest bird
whose views on love are treated with respect by the noble birds;
but the water birds are fools to be laughed at, and the cuckoo is a
plain villain, who is not laughed at but is reprimanded with bitter
contempt. The views of the water birds are mere practical common
sense, which is quite foreign, of course, to the ideas of courtly love;
and the views of the worm fowl are that as long as they have what
they want they do not care what the royal birds do. It is difficult
to resist the suggestion that the water fowl represent the great
merchants, whose fortunes were founded on the import and export

i Super Libroa Sapientie (Reutlingen-Colmar, 1489), Lectio Ixv &.
» See Taylor, op. cit.

'Wright, Political Poems and Songs (Rolls, Series), I, 365.

28 EDITH RJCKERT

trade; the seed fowl, the simple country gentry, whose views
naturally echo those of the lords with whom they are associated in
the holding of land, and whose livelihood depends directly upon the
earth; and the worm fowl, the citizenry, the working classes whose
chief interest in life is so bitterly summed up by the merlin (11. 610-
16) and whose food consists of the casual and disgusting worm —
whatever they can pick up.

Without pressing this point, however, we may proceed to the
observation that if the poem is satirizing the great bourgeoisie and
the " ribald" citizenry, it is satirizing the two classes of men whom
John of Gaunt, more than any other great lord in England, had
particular reason to hate.1

CONCLUSION

1. It is clear that the political allegory heretofore adduced to
motivate the existence of the poem and to explain its meaning is not
only historically unsubstantiated but if it were substantiated explains
neither the girl's failure to choose among the suitors nor the extensive
satire on the common birds.

2. The plans of John of Gaunt for the marriage of his daughter
Philippa seem from the evidence to have taken such shape in the
late winter of 1381 as to make the production of such a poem as
The Parlement of Foules a compliment which would have been
particularly grateful to him, and the special development of the
situation in the poem offered a plausible interpretation of the
collapse of the most desirable plan, which the proud Duke could
hardly have failed to appreciate.2

This study was suggested to me many years ago by Professor
Manly, who in expressing his disbelief in the Richard-Anne theory,
observed that if a historical interpretation was needed it should

1 See p. 17, n. 5, above. For vivid expression of the mob's hatred of him shown at
the burning of the Savoy in 1381, cf. Hist. Vit. Ji Regni Ric. II (ed. Hearne, 1729),
pp. 25 f .

2 Without resting any part of the argument upon Chaucer's relation in general to John
of Gaunt, I may point out here that through the position of his wife as lady-in-waiting
to Constance of Castile, he had the best opportunity of knowing not merely court gos-
sip but much of the attitude of the principals whom it concerned. Thus he was in a
position peculiarly favorable for writing a complimentary poem. Furthermore, in May,
1381, John of Gaunt paid £51 8s. 2d. for the establishment of Elizabeth Chaucy
in Barking Abbey. The hypothesis that she was Chaucer's daughter or sister suggests
a particular motive for an occasional poem which thus found its reward soon after; but
this of course cannot be proved.

A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 29

be possible to find a situation that would fit better; for instance, a
courtship of one of John of Gaunt's daughters. Without commit-
ting myself beyond the possibility of " Retracciouns " to belief in
the necessity of any historical interpretation, I feel at present that
the peculiar features of the poem are not self-explanatory as be-
longing to either a triple demande d' 'amours or a mere exposition of
natural as opposed to illicit love. I am confident, moreover, that
I have outlined a situation which, as far as the evidence goes, not
only fits the poem but supplies an occasion which serves to interpret
its unique structure and a patron from whom Chaucer, both logically
and psychologically, might at that time have expected a reward for
such a poetical compliment. In accordance with the principles of
historical investigation, this hypothesis should be accepted until one
that fits and interprets still better is produced.1

EDITH RICKERT
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

i In another paper I hope to show that the structure and style of the poem, as
well as the condition of the MSS, warrant the further hypothesis that the poem was
begun in 1374 — on the basis of astronomical interpretation of 1. 117, May 12, 1374 —
and finished with an entirely changed conception adapted to the particular situation
which arose in the winter of 1381.

THE PROBLEMS OF AUTHORSHIP AND DATE OF
WYNNERE AND WASTOURE

I. AUTHOKSHIP

When in 1897 Professor Gollancz first edited The Parlement of
the Thre Ages and Wynnere and Wastoure, for the Roxburghe Club,
he suggested that the two were the work of one author. For this
conclusion he gave seven reasons: (1) The poems have lines in
common, and (2) passages in one are strongly reminiscent of passages
in the other. (3) The general framework is the same. (4) Both
use verbal forms in -ande as nouns. (5) Both show careless confu-
sion in details. (6) "Tests of language and meter do not tell against
the identity of authorship." (7) The general impression conveyed
by the two pieces tells strongly in favor of the view. Kolbing in
his review of Gollancz' edition accepted this conclusion, saying that
the use of alliteration was practically the same in both poems.1
In his second edition of the Parlement,2 Professor Gollancz said:
" No criteria gainsay the theory that would assign it [the Parlement]
to the author of Wynnere and Wastoure."

If we look at the evidence for this opinion, however, we find it
not strong. The similarities in phrasing and idea are not more
remarkable than those which connect these poems with Piers the
Plowman and Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knyfit. As a test of author-
ship such similarities are valueless, as Mr. George Neilson's reductio
ad absurdum has demonstrated. As to the third point, the frame-
work is the vision as found in Piers the Plowman and many other
Middle English poems. In regard to the fourth point, the use of
forms in -ande as nouns is extraordinary, but only one instance is
found in each poem, and in one of these the B-Manuscript of Parle-
ment reads make instead of makande. The use is also found sporadi-
cally elsewhere, for example, in the reports of the Guilds, to ye

1 Englische Studien, XXV, 273. He did note one difference between the two:
Parlement has forty-eight lines using vowel alliteration, nine of which rhyme on the same
vowel. In Wynnere only eight cases of vowel alliteration occur, of which one uses the
same vowel.

2 Oxford, 1915, p. 2 of Preface.

31] 31 [MODBBN PHILOLOGY, May, 1920

32 J. R. HULBERT

offrende;1 in the York Plays, to make oure offerand,2 By-cause of
wakand you unwarly* Sende yhou som seand of pis* in The Seven
Sages, ofrand,* in Piers the Plowman, and is trusti of his tailendef
and in Sir Perceval, travellande7 (established by rhyme). In our case,
the peculiarity is probably scribal because in the Parlement it is
found only in Thornton's copy. The fifth point — careless confusion
in details — would apply to many medieval poems, and the seventh —
in regard to general impression — means nothing. Wynnere is so
much more interesting than Parlement that "general impression"
might be said to argue against identity of authorship. The similarity
in the use of alliteration is only negative evidence ; plenty of allitera-
tive poems show the same uses.8

What of the language ? Of course it is impossible to speak with
certainty about the dialect of a poem which exists in only one copy
because the scribe of that manuscript may have altered the dialectal
forms of the original. We know this to have been done in many
cases, for example, in certain manuscripts of Piers the Plowman
and of Chaucer. Perhaps all that can be determined is whether
or not the transmission of two given works is the same. If we find
that two poems existing in a certain manuscript have not been
copied from the same exemplar, or at some earlier point in the trans-
mission have come from different sources, we learn at least that their
presence together in the same manuscript has no significance in
establishing authorship.9

Now a little study of the two poems shows a marked difference
in one of the most noticeable criteria of dialect, verbal inflexion.

1 E.E.T.S., Vol. 40, p. 107.

2 Ed. L. T. Smith, p. 59, 1. 99; p. 60, 1. 138.

a Ibid., p. 281, 1. 270. * Ibid., p. 109, 1. 235. « Ed. Campbell, 1. 2656.

« B-text, VIII, 82. See Skeat's note in the Glossary of the E.E.T.S. edition.

» Camden Society, 1. 1325.

8 See K. Schumacher, Studium fiber den Stabreim in der m.e. Alliterationsdichtung,
1914, Summary, pp. 212-13.

» It seems to me necessary to make these obvious statements because there is still
a strong tendency to regard poems which appear in the same manuscript as works of
one author. Many examples could be cited, from the old days when all contents of the
Exeter Book were thought to have been written by Cynewulf to the present tune when
the opinion is generally expressed that the four poems in manuscript Nero A X (Gawayne
and the Grene Kny%t, Pearl, etc.) were written by one man. As a matter of fact, their
presence in the same manuscript, written by the same hand, ought to make us suspicious
of surface similarities.

AUTHORSHIP AND DATE OF "WYNNERE AND WASTOURE" 33

Parlement has a fairly consistent series of forms of the type ordinarily
called West Midland; that is, the first person singular present indic-
ative ends in -e or - , the second and third singular in -es, -ys, -is,
the plural in -en, -yn; the present participle appears only twice, once
in -ynge, the other time in -ande.1

Wynnere, on the other hand, shows mixed forms. It has endings
like those found in Parlement, but in addition it has another set.
The second singular ends in -este, -st five times, in -is, -es, -ys six
times. The third singular ends in -eth, ethe, -4th twelve times, in
-es, -is, -ys twenty-six times. The plural ends once in -eth, once in
-ith, a few times in -es, but mostly in -e or -en. Forms in -th appear
also in the imperative (dothe, 1. 220) and in the inflexion of the verb
have, where hathe is used as plural and singular; thou haste also
appears three times. The forms in -este appear in the preterite of
auxiliaries (scholdeste, 1. 258; woldeste, 1. 375; woldest, 1. 442), and
of ordinary verbs (madiste, 1. 264; louediste, 1. 304). The present
participle appears more often than in Parlement, three times in
-ynge, twelve times in -ande.

With regard to the distribution of these forms, it should be noted
that the -st, -th endings appear chiefly in the early part of the poem :
th appears in 11. 3, 6, 7, 16. The first appearance of the third singu-
lar in -es is in 1. 68. Up to 1. 201 there are fifteen forms in -th and
seventeen in -es or its variants. Similarly the first three appear-
ances of the second singular are in -este (11. 260, 264, 265), and the
three -ynge forms appear in the first two hundred lines. One might
perhaps infer from these facts that the manuscript before Robert
Thornton, or some predecessor in the line of transmission, used the
-st, -th, -ynge forms more extensively or even exclusively, and that
the copyist at the beginning of his work copied it more literally but
as he progressed became less attentive and used his own forms.2

1 MS B shows four instances of the third singular in -ith, and one instance of the
form hath apparently used as a plural. What the significance of this slight difference
between MSS A and B may be is problematical. B may have been transcribed by a
Southern or East Midland man at some time after it was copied from the ancestor of A ,
or these traces of Southern influence may have been in the ancestor of A. In any case
they do not affect the fact that Robert Thornton's copy of the Parlement shows no such
forms, whereas his copy of Wynnere has many of them.

2 It is possible that a minute study of the language of the two poems would show
other differences. Granting some alteration by scribes, however, one cannot trust
greatly the criteria of difference between Northern and East Midland.

34 J. R. HULBERT

In any case it is certain that Robert Thornton did not add the
East Midland or Southern forms. He was a northern man, and his
ordinary practice seems to have been to alter the language of his
originals in the direction of his own dialect.1 Furthermore, as the
author of Wynnere certainly knew London it is not improbable that
the -st, -th endings, which are correct London forms, belong to the
original draught of the poem.2 Of course such judgments are
merely possibilities; but it is to be noted that from different points
of view the same conclusion is reached — that the original of Wynnere
was more southern than that of Parlement.

II. DATE

In his first edition of Parlement, Professor Gollancz argued that
the date of Wynnere was 1347 or early in 1348. In support of this
date he used the references to the Order of the Garter, the Black
Prince, heraldry, discontent with the Friars, the twenty-fifth year
of Edward III, and "Scharshull" — and the failure to mention
the Black Death.3 In the second edition of Parlement, Professor
Gollancz changed his date to "not much later than 1350, "4 appar-
ently because of a controversy with Mr. George Neilson which
appeared in The Athenaeum for 1901. As far as I can make out,
he chose the first date primarily because of the lack of reference to
the Black Death, and the second because of the statement that the
King had reigned twenty-five years, which would not be true until
1351. Certainly the last-named fact is sufficient to disqualify
Mr. Gollancz' first date: in 1347 Edward III had been on the throne
but twenty-one years. Let us look more closely, however, at
Mr. Gollancz' evidence. The references to the Garter, the Black
Prince, and the heraldic devices of the King give only a date a quo.
Discontent with the Friars was voiced throughout the latter half

1 Horstmann, Alt.-engl. Legenden, N.P., 1881, p. 454, speaking of Thornton's Lincoln
manuscript, says: "Die urspriinglich in einem anderen Dialect abgefassten Gedichte
sind in dem Yorkshire Dialect umschrieben."

2 Probably the same remark applies if the author's reference to the West means some
such locality as Staffordshire or Shropshire.

3 1 have not included the (doubtful) references to a famine followed by a great fire
and to a drought because Mr. Gollancz finds no nearer dates than 1315-16, 1322, and
1325 for them.

* Parlement, 1915, p. 2.

AUTHORSHIP AND DATE OF "WYNNERE AND WASTOURE" 35

of the fourteenth century. The one important piece of evidence is
the reference to "Scharshull," which is as follows: Wastoure wishes
that

alle schent were those schalkes and Scharshull it wiste

That saide I prikkede with powere his pese to distourbe [11. 317-18].

Gollancz shows that Scharshull was Justice of the King's Bench in
1333, that he was dismissed in 1340 but restored to office in 1342,
two years later was made Chief Baron of the Exchequer, and in 1350
was appointed Chief Justice of the King's Bench. He then says:
"The reference in 'Wynnere and Wastoure' is evidently to Scharshull
as Chief of the Exchequer. Wastoure's disregard of his capital,
seeing that the taxes were paid on actual possessions, might well
have disturbed the Chancellor of the Exchequer's peace of mind."1
Mr. George Neilson has already answered this strange statement as
follows: "A reference to a judge in connection with breach of the
peace ('his pese to distourbe') cannot possibly indicate the baron
of the Exchequer."2 If that is not convincing, attention may be
called to a fact not mentioned by Professor Gollancz: Scharshull
was Baron of the Exchequer for only sixteen months, from July,
1344, to November, 1345, when he was removed to the Court of
Common Pleas.3 According to Mr. Gollancz' methods this fact
would require dating the poem 1345. But that date would not
agree with the reference to the twenty-fifth year of Edward Ill's
reign (1351) or to the Order of the Garter, which was not in existence
in 1345.4 In truth Mr. Gollancz wishes to date the poem earlier
than 1350 if possible so as to account for the failure to refer to the
Black Death. To account for that, the date really ought to be 1348,
for if it is put at 1350 the failure to mention the Black Death is surely
much more extraordinary than it would be ten years later. But as
the poet would not have referred to the "five and twenty winters"
of the King's reign when there were only twenty-one or two, that
date is impossible.

The deduction from this discussion is evidently that the argu-
mentum ex silentio is a poor thing. It is no more necessary for us to

1 Parlement, Roxburghe Club, p. xiii.

2 Huchown of the Awle Ryale, Glasgow, 1902, p. 95, note.
» E. Foss, Biographia juridica, 1870, p. 610.

« See article by Sir Harris Nicolas in Archaeologia, XXXI, 104 flf.

36 J. R. HULBERT

explain the poet's failure to refer to the Black Death than to account
for his failure to describe Wastoure's army in detail. Furthermore,
the poem is incomplete; it may have mentioned the pestilence in
the part now lost. The point from which to start then is the refer-
ence to the twenty-five years of the King's reign. This is a " round
number," of course, and would be appropriate at any time after 1351.
The next thing to consider is the reference to "Scharshull." As
Professor Gollancz says, the exact meaning of the reference is not
clear.1 At any rate, Wastoure states that Scharshull "saide I
prikkede with powere his pese to distourbe." Mr. Neilson's effort
to connect the reference with a particular incident of the year 1358
is a failure.2 Mr. Neilson shows that Scharshull was suspended from
his office in 1357, but remarks a propos of the fact that a chronicler
at his death in 1368 referred to him as capitalis justitiarius, "it can
hardly be inferred that he had resumed his office."8 If this were
true it would be very apt for Neilson's date, 1358. But it is not.
Reference to the Patent and Close Rolls shows that Scharshull was
Chief Justice as late as 1361.4 After 1361 he was on many com-
missions of the peace (especially in Staffordshire and Warwick)
until December 24, 1366, when his patent was revoked.6 If the
mention of Scharshull refers to him as Chief Justice, therefore, it
may have been made at any time up to 1361. But the poet, espe-
cially if he was a western man, may have had in mind some deci-
sion made by Scharshull when he was on commissions of oyer and
terminer in Staffordshire. If so, the period is extended until the end
of 1366.

There is one other piece of evidence to be considered. At the
end of the poem, the King sends Wynnere to Rome and Wastoure
to London. Then he says:

& wayte to me Jm Wynere if }>u wilt wele chese
when I wende appon werre my wyes to lede

1 Roxburghe edition, p. xiii.

2 Huchown, pp. 96-98. Athenaeum, 1901, Part2,pp. 157,254,319,351. His further
statement that there is an allusion to the war in Prance "as still in progress" and hence
that the date of the poem is before the signing of the Peace of Brgtigny in 1360 is invalid
because the poet does not state that the war is in progress.

» Huchown, p. 98, n. 2.

« CaL Pat. Roll, 1358-61, p. 547; Close Roll, 1360-64, p. 113. For earlier references
to him in that capacity see the indexes to the proper volumes of the Calendars.

8 Close Roll, 1364-68, p. 289. For the earlier references see the indexes to the
Calendars.

AUTHORSHIP AND DATE OF "WYNNERE AND WASTOURE" 37

ffor at }>e proude pales of parys J>e riche

I thynk to do it in ded & dub J?e to knyghte

And giff giftes full grete of golde & of s[ilver]

To ledis of my legyance \>i lufen me in herlj

& sithe kayren as I come with knyghtes J>at me foloen

To J>e kirke of Colayne l?er J>e kynges ligges.

This is certainly not evidence that the King was actually at war
with France. Rather, it seems to indicate a period when the King
was not active in war and could not use Wynnere for fighting, but
was planning a great attack on France.1 Such a state of affairs can
be found during the truces at the end of the fifties or even after the
signing of the Treaty of Bre"tigny in 1361. This treaty was not
satisfactory to either party, and the French never carried out their
part of it.2 It might be supposed that as Edward by the Treaty
of Bre*tigny gave up his claim on the throne of France he must have
ceased quartering the arms of France with those of England on his
coat-of-arms and that therefore the heraldic description in Wynnere
would fix the date before 1361. But that is not true, as the effigies
on his tomb and on that of the Black Prince still show the quartering.
Hence even after 1361 it would be entirely proper to represent the
King as meditating another great campaign in France.

From these considerations it is clear that any date between 1351
and 1366 would accord with the reference in Wynnere. The only
check upon a late date is the reference to the twenty-five years of
Edward Ill's reign. But it is doubtful how much weight can be
given to that matter. The poem is an allegory, and though the
King doubtless stands for Edward III, statements made about him
need not be so exact as they would be in a direct account. Further,
the number twenty-five is obviously a "round number," suitable
any time after the twenty-fifth year, perhaps even to the fiftieth.
The manner of phrasing — he "hase vs foster de and fedde this fyve
and twenty wyntere" — shows that it is not meant to give a definite
date.

If merely the dating of Wynnere were concerned, the matter would
not be worth so much discussion. But the entire chronology of

1 So Gollancz refers it to the truce which followed the capture of Calais, September,
1347, to June, 1348 (Roxburghe, p. xiv).

2 Longman, Edward III, pp. 61 ff.

38 J. R. HULBERT

alliterative poetry in the fourteenth century and our ideas of the
growth of its technique are involved. If a date such as 1351, or
indeed any date before 1361, is accepted, Wynnere is one of the earliest
extant examples of the alliterative long line, unrhymed, in Middle
English.1 Of course if Parlement is, as Gollancz thinks, an earlier
work of the same author, its position is still more notable. All this
is very hard to believe. Professor Gollancz himself says: "One's
first impression is that The Parlement is a sort of summary of
longer poems — an epitome reminiscent of lines and passages in the
chief alliterative poems of the second half of the fourteenth cen-
tury."2 In his note she calls attention to the resemblance of the
first lines of Parlement to those of Piers the Plowman, and of the
hunting scenes to episodes in Gawayne and the Grene Knyfit. As to
the prologue, he says that because Parlement is earlier than Piers,
"it follows that the famous opening lines of the latter poem, far from
being echoed in the present poem, must have been a conventional
prelude long before Langland impressed it with his genius/'3 Mr.
Neilson gives a long list of resemblances between Parlement and
Gawayne and the Grene Kny$t*

Professor Manly reached practically the same conclusion as
Gollancz. Both Wynnere and Parlement begin, he says, "in a man-
ner suggestive of the beginning of Piers the Plowman, and both
.... contain several lines closely resembling lines in the B-text
of that poem. The lines in question seem, from their better rela-
tion to the context, to belong originally to Piers the Plowman and
to have been copied from it by the other poems; if there were no
evidence, these poems would, doubtless, be placed among those
suggested by it; but there is other evidence [the reference to Schar-

shull] The conclusion is apparently inevitable that the

imitation is on the part of Piers the Plowman."5

The first lines of Wynnere must remind any reader of the begin-
ning of Gawayne and the Grene Knyfit. That these lines are original
in Gawayne and the Grene Knyfit rather than in Wynnere seems prob-
able because they are more natural and appropriate in the former.

1 Gollancz, Roxburghe, p. xi; Wells, Manual, p. 241.

2 Ed. 1915, p. 2 (Preface). » Roxburghe, p. xiv.

4 Huchown, pp. 72-73. Some of them are of course insignificant,
s Cambridge History, II, 42-43.

AUTHORSHIP AND DATE OF "WYNNERE AND WASTOURE" 39

In Gawayne and the Grene Knyfit the poet starts with the siege of
Troy, and passes to the colonization of the west by Trojan exiles,
mentioning Eneas, Romulus, and Brutus. Then, he says, since
Britain was established by Brutus, more extraordinary things
(ferlyes) have happened than in any other country. This is probably
a forecast of the strange adventure of the Green Knight, but before
he can proceed to that the poet must mention Arthur, his court,
and the Christmas celebration. With the setting thus established
he introduces the Green Knight and begins the story. Every step
of the introduction is a logical advance to a definite goal.

In Wynnere, on the other hand, the poet mentions Brutus and
Britain, then the taking of Troy, and finally says,

There hathe selcouthes bene sene in sere kynges tymes
But never so many as nowe by the nyne dele.

But he proceeds from that to general comment on the decay of
the time and the neglect of true poets, and finally falls asleep and
dreams. His selcouthes connect with nothing that follows.

On comparison of the documents, Manly — and I think Gollancz
also — felt that the scenes and lines were original where they were
organic and imitated where they were inorganic. This judgment
seems to be correct, but they disregarded it on account of Scharshull.
Furthermore an early date for these poems would run counter to the
opinion of Skeat as to the technical development of Middle English
alliterative poetry. He says: "The law of progress in alliterative
poetry is from lines cast in a loose mould to lines cast in a strict one;
from lines with two alliterated letters to lines with three," etc.1 In
this respect Wynnere and Parlement are not primitive. Their verse
is far more polished and effective than that of William of Palerne
(before 1361) or Joseph of Arimathie.

Since, as we have seen, the time references in Wynnere indicate
merely a period between 1351 and 1366, and since the parallelisms
in it suggest even to people who believe in an early date imitation

1 Preface to Joseph of Arimathie, p. x. Skeat's law, to be sure, is subject to exceptions;
e.g., a person unfamiliar with recent pieces of alliterative verse might write an early
type at a late date. Furthermore, the law may be incorrect, for it is based on only a
few facts, chiefly the early dates of William of Palerne and of Joseph of Arimathie, which
is in the Vernon manuscript, dated by Skeat "about 1370-80" (Preface to A-text of
Piers, E.E.T.S., p. xv).

40 J. R. HULBERT

of Piers and Gawayne and the Grene Knyfit, the logical date would
seem to be some time after 1361, the date of Piers A.1

As to Parlement, we have no evidence. Even if it should be by
the author of Wynnere, it may have been years later than that work.
Gollancz' argument for priority is as follows: "The 'Parlement'
may well have been written at a somewhat earlier date than ' Winnere
and Wastoure'; in this latter effort the poet shows himself rather
more practiced in his art; his touch seems firmer, his thoughts more
rapid and intense; maybe the theme was more congenial, but under
any circumstances no great interval could have separated the
poems."2 Such argument hardly needs comment. Timon of Athens y
Pericles, Troilus and Cressida, were not written at the beginning of
Shakspere's career, nor were Richard Feverel and The Egoist produced
at the end of Meredith's. So far as I can see, even if they were the
work of one man, Parlement and Wynnere may have been separated
from each other by forty years.

I have no desire to set up a hypothetical chronology like those
which afflict students of Chaucer and Old English literature. But with
several fixed dates, it seems to me that we can get some impression
of the time order of a few early alliterative pieces. The following
arrangement would not conflict with any facts or impressions of
technical development: William of Palerne, 1350-60; Piers A,
1362; Gawayne and the Grene Kny$t before Wynnere^ Wynnere ,
after Piers A but not later than 1366. Parlement is later than Piers
and Gawayne and the Grene Kny%t, and there is no evidence for a date
ad quern.

J. R. HULBERT
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

» Any resemblances to Wynnere found in the B-text of Piers would then be regarded
as the result of chance or imitation by the author of Piers B.

2 Roxburghe, p. xi.

» There is no date a quo for Gawayne and the Grene Kny%t. In the early volumes of
the New English Dictionary, citations from Gawayne and the Grene Knyjt were accom-
panied by the phrase " c. 1340," and from the other poems in the same MS. by " c. 1325.' '
Later volumes however have "13 . . . . "I presume the reason for the change is that
the editors found so many words appearing for the first time in these documents that
they came to doubt their antiquity. Morris on the title page of his E.E.T.S. edition of
Gawayne and the Grene Knyjt estimated the date at about 1360. For another attempt
to date the poem see Modern Philology, XIII, 136, n. 3. Wells gives the date "about
1370" without stating evidence.

RICHARD RAWLIDGE ON LONDON PLAYHOUSES

Among the obscure authors who have suffered in consequence
of misquotation by reformers, few perhaps have been so consistently
misrepresented as Richard Rawlidge. The writer of a brief and
justifiable pamphlet setting forth the disadvantages to a common-
wealth of immoderate drinking and other evils, he has been quoted
by the zealous Prynne in such manner as to imply his bitter opposi-
tion to the theater and to pleasure in general. Through Prynne's
attention his utterance has found its way, in garbled form, into the
productions of Jeremy Collier and other antagonists of the stage,
until many persons have been accustomed to look upon Rawlidge as
a Puritan militant in the fight against the theater. Furthermore,
scholars who have bothered themselves with the history of early
playhouses in London have consulted Prynne's quotation rather
than Rawlidge's original, and in consequence Rawlidge has been
brought into undue prominence — sometimes almost scolded — by
those who have been perplexed by what he apparently said. Miss
Gildersleeve,1 for instance, in endeavoring to assign an order to
suppress the London theaters to the spring of 1582, writes as follows:
" Moreover, Rawlidge's Monster Lately Found Out, published in 1628,
in an account of the controversy states that it was soon after 1580
that the citizens expelled the players and 'quite pulled down and
suppressed' the playhouses in the City"; and further on (p. 219)
she cites his production along with such works as the Refutation of
Hey wood's Apology and the Shorte Treatise against Stage-Playes as
aiding in renewing "the literary onslaught which culminated in
Prynne's Histriomastix." More recently, to limit myself to the
citation of another excellent book, so careful a scholar as Professor
J. Q. Adams states2 that "Richard Reulidge" wrote that "soon
after 1580" the playhouses were suppressed in London, and then
proceeds to quote Prynne instead of the original. Again, on dis-
covering that the list of playhouses suppressed offers considerable

41]

1 Government Regulation of Elizabethan Drama, p. 163.

2 Shakespearean Playhouses, p. 8.

[MODERN PHILOLOGY, May, 1920

42 THORNTON S. GRAVES

difficulties, he asserts1 that "the whole passage written by a Puritan
after the lapse of nearly half a century, is open to grave suspicion,
especially in its details."

Before quoting Rawlidge's own words, which are indeed suffi-
ciently vague and perplexing, let us hasten to say in these times
of national prohibition that they are apparently not the result of
overmuch zeal and that the man should not be stigmatized as a
Puritan. Unquestionably he entertained puritanic tendencies, but
his pamphlet contains a good deal more liberality and common
sense than is found in numerous documents recently composed by
persons entertaining similar tendencies. He does not give the
impression that he is hostile to the drama as drama; he is not at
all concerned primarily with the suppression of the playhouses;
his reference to the theater and its evils is purely incidental in a
production that deals with other subjects. Furthermore, he approves
heartily of the old sports on the Sabbath, attributing the enormous
number of "blind" alehouses and other objectionable resorts to the
suppression, during the reign of James I, of the old-fashioned pas-
times on Sunday. Instead of being a moral agitator or professional
reformer, he is a man of some modesty, admitting that he has no
real right to meddle with the making of books — the business of
poets and scholars instead of " a mechanicall man such a one as I am."

To this honest protest on the part of a good citizen against
real evils of the period was apparently2 given the title A Monster
Lately Found Out and Discovered, or the Scourging of Tiplers.
Although "tipling" is the author 's principal subject, the work
touches upon the "three most grosse and open Sunnedaring vices
hourely committed within the walls and precincts of this Cittie."
These the author carefully lists as follows:

First, Drunkennesse, needlesse drinking, and Gaming permitted in Ale-
houses, and Typling houses without restraint.

Secondly, Swearing, Lying, and open blaspeming the holy name of God
without Checke, or controwle.

1 Shakespearean Playhouses p. 310, note.

2 So Prynne quotes the title (Histriomastix, p. 491), assigning the work to the year
1628. The copy of Rawlidge's pamphlet in the British Museum has no title-page.
A former owner has written on a fly-leaf: "A Monster late found out and discovered,
a discourse against Tipling Houses of the Citie of London by Richard Rawlidge 1606."

RICHARD RAWLIDGE ON LONDON PLAYHOUSES 43

Thirdly, Ingrossing, Regrading, and forestalling the Marketts, so that
hardly can any Victualls be bought, but at the third, or second hand at least.

Significant is the omission of playhouses from these three "raigning
sinnes."

Rawlidge is not clamoring for the making of new laws but asking
for the enforcing of old ones. Whereas, he writes, there are only
122 churches in the city and Liberties, there are "I dare say thirty
hundred Ale-houses, Typling-houses, Tobacco-shops, &c. in London
and the skirts thereof." These should be reduced to at least the
number of churches. To do this "there needes neither mechanicall
pollicies, nor new Sessions of Parliament, for all the laws be well
and good already, there lacks nothing but execution."

Now for the casual reference to the theaters. In a passage of
sermon-like eloquence, the opening of which sounds as if it might
possibly be a " mechanicall" man's echo of a certain tribute in
Richard II, he says:

This so renowned, so famous a Place, this peerelesse Citty, this London,
hath within the memory of man lost much of hir pristine lustre, and renowne,
by being pestered and filled with many great and crying sinnes, which were
first hatched, and are ever since fostered and maintained, in Play-houses, Ale-
houses, Bawdy-houses, Dicing-houses, otherwise stiled Ordinaries, of which,
which are the most Reseptacles of all manner of baseness and ludenesse, is
hard to be distinguish^, for all of them enterteined men and women of all
sorts, come who would if they brought money with them: which houses
of such Receipt flourish and keepe a great quoile in this famous Citty (the
more is the shame) at this day: many a young Gentleman, and prodigall
Citizen, being stript daily both out of lands, money, and wares, in these
Dicing, Tipling, and Gaming houses, by Cheaters, Conny-catchers, and
Shifters, who in the habits of Gentlemen (being indeede nothing lesse) are
there harboured. All which houses, and traps for Gentlemen, and others,
of such Receipt, were formerly taken notice of by many Citizens, and well
disposed graue Gentlemen, who saw, and well perceiued the many incon-
veniences, and great Damage, that would ensue vpon the long sufferance of
the same, not only to particular persons, but that it would also bee a great
disparagement to the Governours, and a dishonour to the Government of
this honourable Citty, if some order were not speedily taken for the suppress-
ing of common houses for Enterludes, and Dicing, and Carding, &c. within
the Citty, and Liberties thereof: wherevpon some of the pious Magistrates
made humble suit to the late Queene Elizabeth of ever-living memorie, and
her privy covnsaile, and obteined leaue from her Maiesty to thrust those
Players out of the Citty, and to pull downe the Dicing houses: which

44 THORNTON S. GRAVES

accordingly was affected, and the Play-houses in Gracious Street, Bishops-
gate-street, nigh Paules, that on Ludgate hill, the White-Friars were put
downe, and other lewd houses quite supprest within the Liberties, by the
care of those religious Senators: for they did their best to remoue all dis-
orders out of their Citties Liberties; and surely had all their successors
followed their worthy stepps, sinne would not at this day haue been so
powerful, and raigning as it is [pp. 2-3].

Before commenting on the passage, let us get before us Prynne's
"verbatim" quotation of the words above. On page 491 of Histrio-
mastix he writes:

The Magistrates of the Citty of London, as M. lohn Field records,
obteined from Queen Elizabeth, of famous memory, about the yeere 1580.
that all Heathenish Playes and Enterludes should be banished upon Sabbath
dayes; and not long after1 many godly Cittizens, and wel-disposed Gentle-
men of London, considering that Play-houses and Dicing-houses, were
traps for yong Gentlemen and others; and perceiving the many incon-
veniences, and great damage that would ensue upon the long suffring of
the same, not onely to particular persons, but to the whole Citty; and
that it would also be a great disparagment unto the Governours, and a
dishonour to the government of this honourable Citty, if they should any
longer continue; acquainted some pious Magistrates therewith, desiring
them to take some speedy course for the suppression of common Play-houses
and Dicing-houses within the Citty of London and Liberties thereof. Who
thereupon made humble suite to Queen Elizabeth and her Privy Councell,
and obtained leave from her Maiesty to thrust the Players out of the Citty,
and pull downe all Play-houses and Dicing-houses within their Liberties:
which accordingly was effected: and the Play-houses in Gracious-street,
Bishops-gate-street, that nigh Pauls, that on Ludgate-hill, and the White-
Friers, were quite put downe and suppressed by the care of these religious
Senators.

A reading of the passages above will reveal the fact that, unless
Prynne is quoting from an edition of A Monster Lately Found Out
other than that in the British Museum, he has misrepresented
Rawlidge, for the latter says nothing about playhouses being put
down "not long after" about 1580; consequently the passage is too
vague and indefinite to be used, as has frequently been done, for
dating certain legislative acts against the stage or showing that
certain inn-yards "nigh Paules," in the Whitefriars, and elsewhere

*At this point Prynne refers the reader to Rawlidge, "where this is verbatim
related."

RICHARD RAWLIDGE ON LONDON PLAYHOUSES 45

were used by players at an early date.1 As a matter of fact, if
we believe — what is at least doubtful — that Rawlidge had in mind
theaters only when he specified the particular "Play-houses" sup-
pressed and if we are justified in attempting to restrict the passage
to refer to any one act of legislation or any specific attack on the
stage, then there is most reason for thinking that he is referring
to the putting down of the theaters which took place apparently2 in
1580 rather than to the suppression vaguely referred to by Fleet-
wood3 as taking place in 1584 or the stringent order of the Privy
Council4 in 1597. The reason for such a statement is that Rawlidge
implies that gamesters and actors suffered from simultaneous legisla-
tion during a reform wave. In 1580 there was apparently launched
a hot fight against gamblers and gambling-houses,8 though I do not
know to what extent the City succeeded in ridding itself of the evil.
A comparison of the quotations above will also show that Prynne
in the fervor of his hatred against the stage has, by substituting
"the Players" for "those Players" and by certain other small altera-
tions and by slight omissions, given the impression that Rawlidge is

1 Cf., for example, Mr. Harold Child's remarkable interpretation of the passage in
Cambridge History of English Literature, VI, 282.

* On the subject of this 1580 order and the bitter fight against the theater during
1580-82, see Mrs. Stopes in Vol. IV (Supplement) to Pumivall's edition of Harrison's
Description of England, pp. 320, note, 320-22; Miss Gildersleeve's Regulation of Eliza-
bethan Drama, pp. 160-64; E. K. Chambers in Malone Society Collections, Vol. I. Part 2,
pp. 168-69; Graves in Studies in Philology, XIV, 90-94. Mrs. Stopes (p. 320, note)
states that in 1580 the Common Council passed an order to pull down the London play-
houses; and Chambers (Malone Soc. Collections, Vol. I, Part 1, p. 46), commenting on
the Lord Mayor's petition (April 12, 1580) to the Privy Council, says that the appeal
was effectual, "as the Privy Council ordered the Middlesex and Surrey Justices to sup-
press plays by letters of April 17 and May 13 respectively." Miss Gildersleeve (p. 161)
says that this legislation was due solely to the plague, but the plague was never serious
in London during 1580.

» Gildersleeve, p. 169; Malone Soc. Collections, Vol. I, Part 2, pp. 165-66.
« Gildersleeve, pp. 187-88; Malone Soc. Coll., Vol. I, Part 1, pp. 76-80.

* On September 5, 1580, Sir James Craft wrote regarding a "close alley," the comple-
tion of which had been forbidden by the Lord Mayor. On September 13, the Mayor
replied that he had "stayed" the building for various reasons and that it had been
thought desirable not only to stay other bowling alleys of a similar nature where "dicing,
carding, and table-play" were held, but also to call in question the licenses already
granted to places of the sort. Mrs. Stopes (Harrison, Desc. of Eng., ed. Furnivall, IV,
321) cites a London regulation dated September 17, 1580: "A precept for a true cer-
tificate [a return] of all common Bowling Allies and Dysinge and carding houses that be in
London, to thende, speedie reformation male be taken for the suppressinge of the same."
On September 24, the Lord Mayor wrote to the Privy Council bringing the dangers of
bowling alleys to their notice and "requesting power to suppress all such bowling alleys,
noth withstanding the Queen's licence granted for the same" (Overall and Overall,
Analytical Index to Remembrancia, pp. 164—65).

46 THORNTON S. GRAVES

rejoicing primarily at the expulsion of the actors from London
and the suppression of the theaters. A careful reading of what
Rawlidge actually writes, however, vague as his words are, makes
it pretty clear that by " those Players" he meant primarily the
gamblers of the period and that he was opposed to theaters, not
because of any scruples against the drama, but because they were
used as effective resorts by the gamesters and sharpers of the time.

Indeed, it may be of interest in this connection to know that
an old champion of the stage has argued that Rawlidge was referring
solely to gaming-houses when he spoke of putting down " play-
houses" in Whitefriars and elsewhere. In his Short View of the
Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage Jeremy Collier used
Rawlidge without consulting the original,1 introducing the passage
with the words, " About the Year 1580, there was a Petition made
to Queen Elizabeth for suppressing Play-Houses." In a marginal
note he refers the reader to Rawlidge's pamphlet, but he is obviously
quoting from Prynne, whom he follows inaccurately. Collier's bit
of carelessness did not escape the eyes of his opponents, for the
author of A Defence of Dramatick Poetry (1698) at once brought him
to task for citing an authority whose work could not be located,
criticized the vagueness of the quotation, and suggested that
the mysterious author might be referring to the suppression of
gaming-houses instead of theaters. "But," he writes, "where
Play-houses and Dice-houses are so suspiciously joyn'd together by
this unknown Author, what if these Play-houses should prove but
Gaming-houses at least; it looks very shrewdly that way, all cir-
cumstances consider'd" (p. 11). In the next year this explanation
was accepted by the author of The Stage Acquitted (p. 43). In the
meantime the writer of The Stage Condemn' d (1698) had rushed to
Collier's assistance, admitting that whereas "Mr. Collier has been
somewhat defective in his Quotation here," still Rawlidge and his
Monster really existed once as proved by "Mr. Prin's" use of them.
Then with the humorous looseness characteristic of many writers of
zealous documents he proves his point by misquoting both Prynne
and Rawlidge: "Our Author may be pleased to know, that Rawlidge
says in the same place, 'That all the Play-houses within the City

i Cf. third edition, pp. 242-43.

RICHARD RAWLIDGE ON' LONDON PLAYHOUSES

were PulFd down, by Order of Her Majesty and Council upon this
Petition, viz. One in Grace-church-street, one in Bishops-Gate-
Street, one near Pauls, one on Ludgate-Hill, and one in White-Friers1 "
(pp. 110-11).

If the author of A Defence of Dramatick Poetry could have seen
Rawlidge's original instead of Collier's garbled version of Prynne's
inaccurate quotation, he would perhaps have believed more strongly
than ever that gaming-houses were meant by the "suspicious join-
ing" of "Play-houses and Dice-houses." Were it not for the
absence in seventeenth-century English of instances of the use of
the word playhouse in the sense of gambling-house, and had not
Rawlidge employed the expression "houses for Enterludes" in the
course of his discussion, we might accept the explanation offered
by this old opponent of Collier and believe that Rawlidge was
using the term "Play-house" to distinguish gambling-houses other
than " Dicing-houses, otherwise stiled Ordinaries," especially since
he makes such a distinction in the expression "these Dicing, Tipling,
and Gaming houses." Yet in spite of what has just been said, I
am not convinced that the author of A Defence of Dramatick Poetry
was entirely wrong. It is at least possible that Rawlidge might
have confused gambling-houses and theaters when, writing loosely
and vaguely, he specified that certain worthy citizens obtained
Queen Elizabeth's permission "to thrust those Players out of the
Citty, and to pull downe the Dicing-houses: which accordingly was
affected, and the Play-houses in Gracious-Street, Bishops-gate-street,
nigh Paules, that on Ludgate hill, the White-Friars were put downe,
and other lewd houses quite supprest within the Liberties."

Just what does the passage mean, and why was Prynne apparently
so careful to insert the "that" before "nigh Paules" and the "and"
before "the White-Friars" ? I have at least directed the attention
of those who would use the passage to the original rather than to
Prynne's interpretation of it, and have shown, I hope, that whereas
Rawlidge may be censured perhaps for writing very vague English,
it is not fair to classify him as one of those actively engaged in the
suppression of the theaters.

THORNTON S. GRAVES

TRINITY COLLEGE, NORTH CAROLINA

LONGFELLOW'S "NATURE"

Among the ideas and studies for literary composition in Southey's
Common-place Book (Fourth Series, p. 48) is the following epitaph:

As careful nurses to the bed do lay

Their children which too long would wanton play,

So to prevent all my ensuing crimes

Nature my nurse laid me to bed betimes.

This is described as an epitaph found "in. some part of Yorkshire."
There is evidently here the basis for a sonnet; but I do not know
that Southey ever used the idea. The lines, however, have such
a marked similarity to Longfellow's sonnet "Nature" that it would
seem that he, presumably finding the suggestion going to waste in
the Common-place Book, made it the basis for his poem:

As a fond mother, when the day is o'er,

Leads by the hand her little child to bed,

Half willing, half reluctant to be led,

And leave his broken playthings on the floor,

Still gazing at them through the open door,

Nor wholly reassured and comforted

By promises of others in their stead,

Which, though more splendid, may not please him more;

So Nature deals with us, and takes away

Our playthings one by one, and by the hand

Leads us to rest so gently, that we go

Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay,

Being too full of sleep to understand

How far the unknown transcends the what we know.

JOHN D. REA
INDIANA UNIVERSITY

[48 48 MODERN PHILOLOGY, May, 1920]

THE GENESIS OF SPENSER'S QUEEN OF FAERIE

Spenser's selection of the figure of a fairy queen to symbolize the
glory pursued by the knights and humanists of the Renaissance —
the idealism of the new England under Elizabeth — was for the period
an anomalous one. Classic literature, on which most of the literature
of the Renaissance was being modeled, has nothing nearer than
goddesses like Venus protecting heroes like Aeneas, while Ariosto's
epic, which Spenser was imitating and which was typical of the
Italian influence in courtly poetry, offers little in the pictures of
enchantresses with their power over the lives of heroes to explain
the fairy queen of Spenser. Further, the attack of Ascham's Schole-
master on Malory's Morte d' Arthur, through which the fairy queens
of romance were probably best known to Elizabethans, may be taken
as typical of the attitude of the learned to Arthurian romance in
England just before Spenser wrote. To most humanists no doubt,
as to Harvey in 1580, the "Faerie Queene" was the "Eluish Queene,"
in tales of whom "Hobgoblin [would] runne away with the Garland
from Apollo."1 How then did Spenser come to adopt the Fairy
Queen as the head of ancient chivalry, substitute her court and
knights for the Round Table of Arthur, and make Arthur merely the
chief figure in her realm? My belief is that his plan was partly
influenced, as has been suggested more than once,2 by the entertain-
ment at Kenilworth in 1575, but more significantly by the comple-
mentary entertainment at Woodstock in the same year.

In the entertainment at Kenilworth,3 Leicester made his appeal to
Elizabeth's known love of things English, and in all probability to
a growing national sentiment as well. Those who devised his

1 "Three Letters," in Works of Harvey (ed. Grosart), I, 95.

2 Warton (Observations on the Fairy Queen [1807], I, 39-45) considered the "Ladyes
of the Lake" repairing to Eliza in the April Eclogue of the Shepheardes Calender a refer-
ence to the Kenilworth performance and indicative of the possible influence of pageants
on Spenser's fairies. Greenlaw in an interesting study of the conventions of "Spenser's
Fairy Mythology" in Studies in Philology, XV, 105 fl., thinks that the entertainment
may have suggested a number of features of the Faerie Queene.

s Described in Gascoigne's Princely Pleasures at Kenelworth Castle and Laneham's
Letter. References to the first are to Cunliffe's edition of Gascoigne's Works, Vol. II.
References to the second are to Furnivall's edition.
49] 49 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, May, 1920

50 CHAKLES READ BASKERVILL

"shews" turned to account the romance of English history. The
chief of them, Ferrers and Gascoigne, belonged to the school that
produced the Mirror for Magistrates and Gorboduc, both of which
use in poetic form events of English history. Even the folk diver-
sions provided for Elizabeth at Kenilworth included a morris with
Maid Marian, the associate of Robin Hood as national hero of the
folk, and a Hox Tuesday play from Coventry, said to represent the
courage of English women as contributing to the defeat of the invad-
ing Danes in the days of Ethelred. The popular and the romantic
elements met in the ballad which was to have been sung by an
"auncient minstrell" dealing with the acts of the most glorious
figure of England's past, Arthur, whose Round Table in the days of
Leicester had passed to organizations of archers among the folk.1

This national sentiment Leicester was utilizing for his own pur-
poses. The diversions at Kenilworth were arranged to suggest that
the lord of the castle was of royal English ancestry and particularly
that he was Arthur's heir. The ancient foundation of Kenilworth
and Arthur's abode there were stressed; reference was made to the
tenure of Roger Mortimer,

who first begun,
(As Arthures heire) to keepe the table round;2

and above all the fairy queen as the Lady of the Lake and protectress
of Arthur was represented as abiding with her nymphs in the lake
at Kenilworth. Indeed it was through the use of genii locorwn that
the greatest emphasis was given to the idea that at Kenilworth the
traditions of the golden age of England were still alive. The giant
trumpeters on thye wall "ment, that in the daies and Reigne of K.
Arthure, men were of that stature." Genii of the woods were
Sylvester, a savage man clad in ivy, who addressed Elizabeth on her
return from hunting; his son Audax, clothed in moss; and Silvanus,
god of the woods. As the Queen entered the castle the Lady of the
Lake with her two " nymphs" came over the water, promising
Elizabeth such love as she had given Arthur and yielding "the Lake,
the Lodge, the Lord" to the royal command.3

1 Brydges, British Bibliographer, I, 125 ff. For the morris of the folk bridal, the Hox
Tuesday play, and the ballad, see Laneham, pp. 20-32, 36-43.

2 For Mortimer's Round Table see Ellison, Early Romantic Drama at the English
Court, p. 25; and Warton, Observations on the Fairy Queen, I, 41, note, 63, note.

3 Gascoigne, Works, II, 92 ff. Giants as ancient inhabitants of sites of cities had been
carried in many a civic pageant in which the glorious past was celebrated by enthusiastic

THE GENESIS OF SPENSER'S QUEEN OF FAERIE 51

Leicester overshot his mark in glorifying himself. Though each
genius loci surrendered to Elizabeth and flattered her with the usual
fulsome extravagance, she seems to have resented the implied glori-
fication of her subject Leicester. Possibly she recalled the tradition
that Arthur was to come from his abode with the Lady of the Lake
or from the other world to rule England again. Laneham records
that upon the Queen's entrance to the castle when the Lady of the
Lake made tender of her domain, "It pleozed her highness too
thank this Lady, & too ad withall, 'we had thought indeed the
Lake had been oours, and doo you call it yourz noow? Wei, we
will he*erin common more with yoo heerafter'" (p. 7). Leicester
was obtuse apparently. Futile attempts were made for several days
to present Gascoigne's masque urging Elizabeth's marriage to
Leicester. Gascoigne could not attribute the failure "to any other
thing, then to lack of opportunitie and seasonable weather" (p. 120),
but the Queen probably deliberately avoided hearing the masque.
She finally left Kenilworth suddenly.

The devices and speeches at Kenilworth were echoed in many
details of the entertainment presented before Elizabeth shortly
afterward at Woodstock1 — for example, the use of Sibylla, the
transformation of a man into an oak, with the voice issuing from
the tree, the presence of a fairy queen, and particularly the tale and
play dealing with the royal marriage. The performance at Wood-
stock seems to have been intended to offset that at Kenilworth,2
whether it was inspired by hostility to Leicester or designed to
restore him to the Queen's favor through evidence of a more self-
effacing spirit. Another note was dominant, that of the willing
service and sacrifice of Elizabeth's subjects without hope of reward,
and in the dramatization of "Hemetes' Tale," which was "as well
thought of, as anye thing euer done before her Maiestie, not onely
of her, but of the rest" (p. 102), the good of the country was placed
before the personal inclination of its princess in the matter of marriage.

citizens (Withington, English Pageantry, pp. 50 ff.). Apparently as spirits of wood or
mount, wild men, or woodwose, appeared in connection with Henry VIII's pageants in
which romantic mounts with caves and forests were represented (Letters and Papers of
Henry VIII, II, 1494-1502). See also Boas, University Drama, p. 161, and Withington,
op. cit., pp. 72-77, for other records of such figures in pageantry.

1 Under the title "The Queenes Majesties Entertainment at Woodstocke" Cunliffe
reprints in PMLA, XXVI (1911), 92 ff., Cadman's volume of 1585 dealing with the
entertainment .

2 Cunliffe, PMLA, XXVI. 130-31.

52 CHARLES READ BASKERVILL

The fairy motive was expanded at Woodstock for the flattery
of the Queen with notable success. An arbor was formed of branches
on a marvelous mount made round an oak, with a hollow chamber
or cave beneath, from which music issued (p. 98). This "walke"
of the Fairy Queen was the scene of an elaborate banquet to Eliza-
beth. The crescent-shaped table mentioned was, I presume, for
the royal Cynthia, and the round table, with its chair of crimson
satin embroidered with pictures of trees and beasts, for the Fairy
Queen. Any traditions which associated beings of the other world
with the elvish, the dark, or the uncouth were disregarded. Love,
said the Fairy Queen to Elizabeth,

hath caused me to transforme my face,
and in your hue to come before your eyne,
now white, then blacke, your frende the fayery Queene.

She arrived at the bower "drawen with 6. children in a waggon of
state: the Boies brauely attired, & her selfe very costly apparrelled,
whose present shew might wel argue her immortality." That this
splendor was directly turned to the flattery of Elizabeth was indi-
cated in the entertainments at Quarrendon,1 where the Woodstock
show was pretty clearly described:

The place and persons were so fitlie shuted:
For who a Prince can better entertaine
Than can a Prince, or else a prince's vaine ? [p. 456].

Yet the whole conception of the Fairy Queen at Woodstock was
appropriate to English fairy tradition — to which belonged the mound,
the cave,2 the table of turf, the round table,3 the gifts, and even the
royal pomp. She and her entourage were clothed in the splendor
which the folk fancy in its lordliest flights gave to the other world
and which appeared in the picture of the fairy court in the early

1 The "Speeches" at Quarrendon, 1592, are to be found in Nichol's Progresses
of Elizabeth (1823), III, 193-213, and in Works of Lyly (ed. Bond), I, 453-70. References
are to Lyly's Works. Cunliffe quotes the speeches in part in discussing their relation
to the entertainment at Woodstock.

2 Scot, Discovery of Witchcraft (ed. Nicholson), p. 510: Fairies "do principally inhabit
the Mountains, and Caverns of the Earth, whose nature is to make strange Apparitions
on the Earth." See also the Daemonology of James I, Book iii, chap, v, for a reference to
the belief of witches that "they haue bene transported with the Phairie" before a "faire
Queene " in a hill that opened. But the mount with the cave was one of the chief romantic
devices of earlier Tudor pageants (Mod. Phil., XIV, 470-71 ; Peuillerat, Revels Edward and
Mary, pp. 3, 6, 7, 8, 255; and Withington, op. cit., pp. 192-93) as well as part of the
popular conception of the fairy abode.

s For traditions of the Round Table and its connection with the world of magic, see
Mott, PMLA, XX (1905), 231-64, and Brown, Harvard -Studies and Notes, VII, 183-205.

THE GENESIS OF SPENSER'S QUEEN OF FAERIE 53

lay of Sir Orfeo. In the dramatization of the tale of Hemetes, the
Fairy Queen served as a guiding spirit, belonging not to the region
of the Indus, the home of the mortal dramatis personae, but to the
land whioh those wanderers sought — ruled by a "Lady in whom
inhabiteth the most vertue, Learning, and beauty, that euer yet
was in creature" (p. 96).

The fairy lore of royal progress and of court masque and play
was probably launched at Woodstock on its successful career. The
Fairy Queen with her "nymphs" appeared before Elizabeth at
Norwich in 15781 with speeches and dances prepared by Churchyard,
and fairies figured again and again in masques and plays of the suc-
ceeding decades, especially in the nineties. The device at Wood-
stock may have suggested the Fairy Queen who with her nymphs
danced before Elizabeth at Elvetham in 1591, presenting a garland
with an address to the Queen.2 The Old Knight's Tale of the
Quarrendon "Speeches" in 1592 presumably describes the Wood-
stock performance.

One feature of the banqueting bower at Woodstock may have a
relation to Spenser's allegorical poem in a quite different fashion.
The wall was hung with a "Number of fine Pictures with posies of
the Noble or men of great credite." The "Allegories," says the
writer, "are hard to be vnderstood, without some knowledge of the
inuentors." The "Speeches" at Quarrendon declared seventeen
years later the interest with which this personal allegory was received :

The fayrie Queene the fayrest Queene saluted

Of all the pleasures there, among the rest,
(The rest were justes and feates of Armed Knightes),
Within hir bower she biddes her to a feast,
Which with enchaunted pictures trim she dightes,
And on them woordes of highe intention writes:

Manie there were that could no more but vewe them,
Many that ouer curious nearer pride.
Manie would conster needes that neuer knewe them,
Som lookt, som lyked, som questioned, some eyed,
One asked them too who should not be denied.

J Nichols, Progresses of Elizabeth (1st ed.), II. 84-87.
2 Works of Lyly (ed. Bond), I, 449-50.

54 CHARLES READ BASKERVILL

Elizabeth, according to the writer who describes the entertainment
at Woodstock, was so pleased with the day's diversions that she
ordered the whole to be delivered to her in writing, used the help of
the devisors to decipher the meaning, and, her curiosity satisfied,
had " of ten in speech some part hereof with mirth at the remem-
brance" (p. 103).

Spenser's patriotism, his interest in the ancient English poets, and
his love of allegory and romance were such as to make the entertain-
ments at Kenilworth and Woodstock with their mixture of historical,
mythological, and allegorical elements appeal to him from various
angles. Indeed parallels can be found in them for many romantic
elements of the Faerie Queene, though most of the parallels are
commonplaces of romance. The Fairy Queen of Woodstock, with
the feast in her bower preceded by the tourney of knights, may have
suggested the conception of a great festival of the Fairy Queen
and the gathering of knights for feats of arms at her court as a sub-
stitute for Arthur's. But what seems more certain is that we have
here support for the theory that Arthur in Spenser's allegory was
intended to represent Leicester.1 Perhaps Spenser, coming into the
service of Leicester, utilized the devices of the entertainment at
Woodstock by flattering Elizabeth directly in the figure of the
Fairy Queen as the symbol of national glory, and carried still further
the idea of the entertainment at Kenilworth by representing Leicester
in the figure of Arthur as the flower of chivalry in the service of the
Fairy Queen, led on by a dream of union with her. The effect at
Woodstock would be countered by Spenser's picture of Leicester as
the "brave knight, perfected" in all the virtues, the succor and stay
of other knights, and the ornament of the kingdom of the Fairy
Queen. Spenser may have modified the plan of an epic already
conceived, or from the plan for an occasional piece he iriay have
been swept out by the romantic and historical materials with which
he was dealing into his idea for a national epic that would embody
in " allegories" at once the glorious traditions of the past and the
splendor of contemporary England.

UNIVERSITY OP CHICAGO CHARLES READ BASKERVILL

1 See Kitchin, Faery Queene, Book I, p. xv, note (Holinshed's account of a representa-
tion of Arthur to natter Leicester), and Oxford Spenser, pp. li-liii.

ON THE DATE OF THE OWL AND THE NIGHTINGALE

In Mr. Henry Barrett Hinckley's suggestive argument for the
earlier date of The Owl and the Nightingale1 he says, "But the reading
of the Cotton MS alone should have warned us against this con-
clusion since the verb under-wat has the meaning of a present tense
and shows that the scribe understood that Henry was still living when
the prayer was offered." The evidence from the C reading undercoat
has some extremely doubtful features. In the first place, the textual
evidence is at least as strong against the correctness of the C reading
as for it. It is a priori just as likely that the C scribe here should
have mistaken a 5 in his original for a ^ as that the J scribe in writing
under-yat mistook a f for a 5. (In line 1469 the C scribe mistook f
for 5, writing %if for wif.) Moreover, Breier2 on a fresh examination
of the MSS declares for under-pat as the reading in C 1091, assuming
that the scribe has mistaken 5 for p, though it must be admitted that
he might equally well have taken ^ for j>, as he did in 187.

But even if we accept under-wat, Mr. Hinckley's contention that
it is a present tense rests upon the insecure assumption that the word
is a compound of the preterit-present verb witan, wdt. Breier3
points out that Bradley-Stratmann's sole citation for the ME
compound is this passage. It is usually assumed that the word is
underwiten, in which case under-wat is preterit after all, not preterit-
present. In a matter so important as this, other evidence should be
furnished not merely for the existence of underwiten, but for a preterit-
present underwdt.

Whether we read under-wat or under-yat, there is well-nigh con-
clusive evidence that it is a past tense. And the same evidence
points strongly to under-fiat as the original. Close attention to the
highly dramatic nature of the debate at this point shows that in 1091,

J>at under-wat (yat) J>e king Henri,

the nightingale is turning against the owl her own statement in 1055:
]?e louerd fcat sone under-5at.

1 Modern Philology, XVII, 252.

2 Eule und Nachtiyal, Halle, 1910, p. 161. » Ibid., p. 37.

55] 55 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, May, 1920

56 JOHN S. KENYON

There the owl, after asserting that the nightingale had misled the
lady to commit sin, says, "The lord at once discovered this [pat in
unemphatic position] and laid a snare to catch you." The nightin-
gale replies with great skill (cf. 1067-74) that the apparent triumph
of this lord was really his ignominious defeat: "His own disgrace
was brought about by his treatment of me, — that King Henry dis-
covered and punished." Here the emphatic position of pat and king
Henri gives the retort a peculiar a fortiori force: "his act was dis-
covered by King Henry himself!" C 1055 is then not merely a
parallel passage for under-wat in 1091, but is inseparably connected
with it in the give and take of the two contestants. Either a differ-
ent verb or a present tense in 1091 would quite obliterate the dramatic
connection.

JOHN S. KENYON
HIRAM COLLEGE

REVIEWS AND NOTICES

Lewis Theobald. His Contribution to English Scholarship. With
Some Unpublished Letters. By RICHARD FOSTER JONES. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1919. Pp. xi+363.

This interesting study, which has the twofold purpose of giving a biog-
raphy and of demonstrating the derivation of Theobald's editorial method
from Richard Bentley, acknowledges frankly a heavy indebtedness to Louns-
bury's Text of Shakespeare, but fortunately excels that work in several
respects. There is less of the clenched fist and flashing eye; and a greater
brevity — perhaps it is tact — has suppressed some of Lounsbury's slashing
conclusions. While Dr. Jones does not disagree with Lounsbury as often
as he should, his volume is in general a safer book to consult than Louns-
bury's, though the latter has a much greater wealth of documentation.

The relative slightness of the new material on Theobald's life and
personality is disappointing. We should like more information as to the
sources of his income, as to the basis of his friendly relations with Sir Robert
Walpole; we should like to know why, in view of these relations, he appears
from 1718 to 1728 more often in connection with the Tory Mist's journals
than with any other newspapers; we are puzzled by the savageness of his
attack on Pope, and cannot but wonder if he was urged to an aggressive
tone by other influences than his undoubted love of truth. Did he con-
sciously try to found his scholarly reputation on the ruins of Pope's ?

Dr. Jones has limned us a personality for the editor; but this portrait
seems not to be his happiest achievement. He speaks of Theobald as a
modest, sensitive person, lacking in self-reliance and " rudely shaken by
Pope" (see pp. 167, 204, 215, 250). Evidence for this view is found in
Theobald's reliance on Warburton and in the remark of Dr. Grey that
Theobald, "'a person seemingly in other respects very modest,' treated
Pope too harshly notwithstanding TheDunciad." As evidence of something
very different from modesty and diffidence — which seem almost Theobald's
greatest lacks — one may cite the title-page and tone of Shakespeare Restored,
Theobald's treatment of Meystayer in connection with the Perfidious Brother,
his habit of exaggeration (p. 175), his dogmatic manner of speaking (p. 213),
and even his attitude toward Warburton — the laying upon him of one request
after another involving much labor, and when Warburton, restive for
lack of an invitation to honor either the title-page or at least the Preface of
Theobald's Shakespeare with his name, showed signs of setting up as an
independent critic, the calm announcement on Theobald's part that his
57] 57

58 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

acknowledgment in the Preface of Warburton's services "has entail'd this
rich Consequence, that it has given me a Right (through your generous Grant)
to demand all your Capacities for my Service." (The italics are Theobald's.)
These are not the words of a diffident man.

This matter of personality seems important, because the clash with
Pope was largely a matter of personalities. In the war between the scholar
and the bel-esprit, Pope, to be sure, early allied himself with 'the wits; but
while his attack on "verbal criticism" is as explicit in his Essay on Criticism
as in the Dunciad, the latter has an acridity born of personal dislikes. Not
" blockheadry " but lack of wit and gentlemanly decorum was the hinge of
Pope's satire on Theobald, as he plainly shows in the passage he adapts
from La Bruyere concerning Theobald (see Dunciad of 1729, p. 184). If,
on the other hand, Theobald had had a different personality, he would have
listened to Pope's calls for help on Shakespeare, would have given some of
his numberless emendations, would have received favors in return (for
Pope could be generous in such cases), would have eventually become Pope's
successor as editor of Shakespeare — and the world would have lost the
Dunciad.

With regard to the vexed problems concerning this satire Dr. Jones is
usually content with traditional views, especially those of Lounsbury.
Most of these views have been based on the romantic assumption that Pope
was as black as can be painted. Hence the malicious notion, generally
accepted, that the "Bathos" was designed to serve as an agent provocateur
to justify the Dunciad, a notion for which there is very little evidence.
Presswork on the third, called the "last," volume of the Miscellanies had
begun as early as June, 1727 (see the Elwin-Courthope Pope, IX, 524), and
the expectation was to publish in the winter. The Dunciad was to conclude
the volume. The "Bathos," which was "in great forwardness" in June,
Pope intended for the fourth, called finally the "third," volume of the
Miscellanies. Presently the poet determined to publish the Dunciad
separately, and not having verses to fill the consequent gap in the "last"
volume, he filled it with the "Bathos," the only one of the prose pieces fitted to
appear in a volume devoted otherwise to verse. The agent provocateur theory
demands the assumption that Pope feared the Dunces. Mystification with
regard to the authorship of the Dunciad does not prove fear; for such mysti-
fication was natural to Pope; many of his major works appeared anony-
mously. He may have feared actions for libel, and he may have feared that
his stooping to answer his lowly opponents — even though for twelve years
their attacks had been frequent and (so far as we know) often unprovoked —
would be a reproach to one of his standing; but his assurance of triumph
over them is seen in his words to Swift (see the Elwin-Courthope Pope, VII,
124): "This poem will rid me of these insects." On the face of it, why
should the "Bathos," which is predominantly an attack on the dulness of
poets, be regarded as an attempt to provoke attacks to justify the Dunciad,

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 59

which primarily attacks scholarship? If Pope had been scheming to pro-
voke outbursts from Theobald and his like, he would have changed the
"Bathos" much more extensively, and Philips and Blackmore would there
have yielded to Theobald in importance. Furthermore, the Dunciad came
out only ten weeks after the "Bathos," and hence friend and foe alike would
have seen that the poem was in press before many had time to make con-
sidered retorts to the prose attack. The "Bathos" is perhaps to be regarded
as the first overt act in a Pope "offensive," but there is no post hoc relation-
ship effectively established between it and the Dunciad. The current view
of the matter, however, has even smaller grounds of credence if we accept
it, as Lounsbury and Jones do, with the added notion that the "Bathos"
failed to evoke any great quantity of attacks. Pope could easily have post-
poned the Dunciad until two or three volumes of attacks were added. The
Lounsbury- Jones idea of the inefficacy of the "Bathos" finds its only basis
in an unwarranted belief that all such attacks were included in a volume
called A Compleat Collection of all the verses, essays, Letters and Advertisements,
which have been occasioned by the Publication of Three Volumes of Miscellanies,
by Pope and Company (1728). From the relatively slender resources at
hand the reviewer has been able to find at least six additional attacks printed
within the ten weeks between the "Bathos" and the Dunciad, and there is
every reason to believe that the larger resources of English libraries would
furnish several other items of the same sort. At times in his career Pope
was the aggressor; he was not so in the case of Theobald. So far as the
grounds of the quarrel go, on the other hand, Theobald certainly had the
better of it, except for the fact that the needless aggressiveness of Shakespeare
Restored struck the first blow.

So far as demeanor during the battle is concerned, we may readily agree
with Dr. Jones that Theobald seems the more decorous. But we might have
to revise this opinion if we knew as much about the small details of Theobald's
career1 as we do of Pope's. It is disingenuous of Theobald to insist that

1 For example, if we knew the detailed activities of the so-called "Concanen Club."
Dr. Jones, more judicious than Lounsbury, is frank to admit the existence of the Club.
But both Lounsbury and he should have taken this Club and its connection with Mist's
Journal more seriously. It is interesting to note that the leading article of (Mist's)
Weekly-Journal or Saturday' s-Post for March 20, 1725 (which is an attack on the
Shakespeare of Pope and Tonson) says in closing: "And we take this Opportunity of
inviting you [Mr. Mist], to be a Member of a Club or Society of Authors, which is to meet
once a Week, or oftner, as Occasion shall require, to consider of Ways and Means for
keeping up and maintaining the Privileges of Authors, and defending our Rights and
Properties against the Incroachments of Booksellers and Players." Theobald was a
member of this Club just being formed; his dedication of Shakespeare Restored is dated
two days before this letter attacking Pope and announcing the Club appeared in the
Journal, Clearly he was not commencing his attack without "moral support," and one
may suspect that his unfortunate tone concerning Pope's work came in part from this
Club. Another passage in the letter just quoted assures the seller of Pope's Shakespeare
that a new, better edition "would reward him in the Sale." This seems certainly to hint
that as early as 1725 Theobald dreamed of editing the dramatist.

60 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

"he had always treated Pope with deference and respect" (Jones, p. 112);
but, so far as we know, he was guilty of nothing so bad as the "lies and half-
lies" which Pope seems to, have told. In at least one case, however, the
poet was not so guilty as has generally been thought. He does not accuse
Theobald (in the note to Book I, line 106, of the 1729 Dunciad) of ingratitude
but of bad manners. Pope had publicly advertised for aid on his edition of
Shakespeare; and Theobald, while not giving aid, had at the same time
asked favors of Pope. His later defense against a supposed charge of ingrati-
tude, while it has satisfied commentators from Nichols to Dr. Jones, seems
not to answer the charge really made. Theobald is further disingenuous
in his defense of concealing his design on Shakespeare when Pope asked for
aid. In one letter (see Nichols' Illustrations, II, 221) he says: "To say I
concealed my design is a slight mistake : for I had no such certain design,
till I saw how incorrect an Edition Mr. Pope had given the publick." Unfor-
tunately in another letter (see Lounsbury, pp. 331-32), Theobald had already
used a totally different defense: "It is a very grievous complaint on his side,
that I would not communicate all my observations upon Shakespeare, tho'
he requested it by public advertisements. I must own, I considered the
labor of twelve years' study upon this author of too much value rashly
to give either the profit of it to a bookseller whom I had no obligations to;
or to the credit of an editor so likely to be thankless." Theobald was cer-
tainly ready by 1725 to prosecute any design with regard to the text of
Shakespeare that might yield most return in reputation. The prosecution
was, on his side, entirely justifiable, but it was neither generous nor, in
manner, quite gentlemanly. On the other hand we may grant that Pope
distorted facts recklessly and often — as, for example, when he transferred
the weekly crucifixion of Shakespeare from the Censor to Mist's Journal;
but may one suggest that few commentators ever grant the possibility of
an unintentional misstatement in Pope's work? The Dunciad seems fully
as reckless as it does calculating in its malice.

Usually the effect of Pope's "libels" has been thought scathing; one
hardly knows how to interpret Dr. Jones's view. On page 133 he says:
"It is this variorum edition of The Dunciad that was largely responsible for
the character of Theobald that has come down to recent times." On page
198, speaking of the period after Theobald's Shakespeare had appeared,
Dr. Jones tells us that Theobald's "letters written at this time also show that
his edition had entirely removed any stigma that might have been incurred
from The Dunciad, and that he occupied a favorable position in the eyes of
the public." Page 203 reiterates this view. If Theobald lived down the
variorum Dunciad, it seems strange that after Pope deposed him in 1742,
the odium should return. Has it ever been suggested that allied with Pope's
satire was the fact that Theobald was neither a university man nor a clergy-
man? Very few men of his century outside that potent dual tradition
attained to better reputation than did Theobald. In leaving this phase

REVIEWS AND NOTICES

of Dr. Jones's work one may remark that there is no occasion for amazement
that Pope called the brilliant emendator dull; one need only remember
that the bel-esprit from Solomon to Pope has tended to regard much study
as a weariness and all editors as dull dogs. Theobald's letters here printed
by Dr. Jones show more power of emendation than of personality.

The more valuable part of Dr. Jones's work is that which traces the
methods of English scholarship in Theobald's day. The derivation of the
method from Bentley is made so probable by Dr. Jones that few will dispute
his conclusions. But having thus established the dependence of Theobald
on the great classicist, Dr. Jones proceeds to forget Bentley at times and to
heap all the credit upon his hero. We are told (p. 244) "that Jortin, Warton,
Upton, and Church used a method which did not exist before Theobald."
And on page 251 we read : " One reason why in the end Theobald 's reputation
was unable to overcome the misrepresentations of Pope lay in the fact that
as his method became more general its source was obscured." But, it may
be urged, Theobald did not originate; he only adapted; and Jortin, Warton,
Upton, and Church were also capable of independent adaptation. It is
not entirely clear in what respects Theobald modified Bentley's method.
We are not told much except that while Bentley drew parallels for purposes
of annotation or emendation from all possible sources, Theobald sensibly
made a specialty of expounding Shakespeare by parallels from the dramatist
himself and from books that he might have read. Patrick Hume, however,
in his 321 folio pages of notes on Milton had cited many parallels from Milton's
reading — for purposes other than emendation, to be sure — and he should
receive credit for at least hinting this adaptation. Similarly, while approv-
ing in substance Theobald's claim that his work is "the first Assay of the
kind on any modern Author whatsoever," one should consider at least
Fenton's unsuccessful "assay" of Milton (1725) and possibly some editions
of Continental authors. It is happiness in emendation that gives Theobald
his soundest reputation today; he is less admirable for method. Dr. Jones
tells us on page 192 that Theobald "blazed the trail succeeding editors have
always followed"; and on page 219, that he "made popular a method which,
with amplifications and modifications, has come down to the present day."
If Dr. Jones had compared Theobald's methods with the brilliant textual
methods that have recently been evolved for Shakespeare by Pollard,
McKerrow, and other English scholars, he would have revised his account
of the defects of Theobald's edition (pp. 189-91). Considered from a
modern point of view Theobald's method was very bad for at least three
reasons unstressed by Dr. Jones. Theobald chose the least authoritative
text extant — Pope's — as the basis of his edition; he made no attempt, so
far as Dr. Jones shows, to determine the interrelationships and relative
authority of the different quartos and folios; and lastly he was far too eager
to emend. It is very well to assert his insistence on proof for an emendation;
he was not like Pope or Fenton in the matter. But one who boasts that he

62 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

can make five hundred more emendations on Shakespeare than a rival editor;
who fairly early in his career announces two thousand emendations on
Beaumont and Fletcher, and later can "amend and account for above 20
thousand Passages in Hesychius" — such a scholar seems not a model of
method in the "critical doubt." For his own day, Theobald's method was
good; but we may be thankful that it has not "come down to the present
day" without being thoroughly revolutionized.

The ground covered by this study is most varied, extensive, and difficult.
Dr. Jones has displayed great industry and good judgment; but it is not
to be expected that a doctoral dissertation on so complex a field should be
free from error. It is, therefore, with no desire to depreciate this judicious
industry that the following errors are indicated. In view of the existing
evidence1 that "Book and the man" was a misprint in the first Dunciad,
it is regrettable that Lounsbury's theory on the passage is accepted by
Dr. Jones (p. 129). Again he follows Lounsbury and others in misdating
the first appearance of Pope's "Fragment of a Satire," a misdating which
would be harmless were it not for the unwarranted implications woven about
the wrong date and Gildon's "venal quill" by Mr. Courthope. The proper
date, with the first known version of the "Fragment," is found in the
St. James Journal of December 15, 1722.2 In speaking of Fielding's attitude
toward Theobald, one should certainly mention chapter viii of a Journey
from This World to the Next.

Errors, probably typographical, have been noted as follows: Zachary
Pearce's name is misspelled, p. 40, note 26; on p. 357 the Index should refer
to Hawley, not Harley, Bishop. A number of references are faulty : Note 47,
on p. 19, does not support the text in all the assertions made. On p. 87,
note 35, for 160 read 161. On p. 93, note 52 should refer to p. iv rather than
to vi. Page 116, note 33, for 20 read 181; p. 156, note 2, for 422 read 322;
p.'160, note 11, for 241-45 read 341-45; p. 166, note 27, for September 17
read September 19; p. 182, note 60, for xliv read xlvi; on p. 349, the refer-
ence concerning the Metamorphoses should be to Nichols' Illustrations,
Vol. II, p. 711, not p. 708.

The bibliography of Theobald's works (Appendix D) is also susceptible
of improvement. Complete bibliographical description of the works is
never given, and title-pages are printed with unsystematic modifications.
One would like statements as to how many times the various works were
reprinted. Certainly the earliest editions should be listed, and this is not
done in the case of the History of the Loves of Antiochus and Stratonice, here
dated 1719, but apparently printed in 1717. Ban and Syrinx, an Opera,
in one Act (so advertised in the Weekly-Journal or Saturday' s-Post for

i See the Elwin-Courthope Pope, IV, 271, n, 2, and VII, 110.

* Ibid., V, 445; see also for Mr. Aitken's discovery of this version the Academy for
February 9, 1889.

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 63

March 22, 1718) is omitted from the bibliography altogether, though men-
tioned on page 26. The Gentleman's Library, which Dr. Jones has " found
no trace or mention of .... except in Theophilus Gibber's Lives of the
Poets, vol. 5, p. 287," and which he consequently dates 1722, is frequently
advertised, as are several of Theobald's works, in the Weekly- Journal early
in 1718. The advertisement should be interesting to any who believe
Theobald above equivocation, because it attempts to give the anonymous
work the protection of Sir Richard Steele's name. The advertisement notices
the Censor, the Gentleman's Library, and the Lady's Library. Yoked by
an "Also" with a long description of the Censor comes the following:

The Gentleman's Library; containing Rules for Conduct in all Parts of
Life, viz. Education, Learning, Dress, Conversation, and Choice of Friends,
Love and Gallantry, Courage and Honour, Affectation, Idleness, Envy, Recrea-
tions and Studies, Lying, Wit and Humour, Drinking, Marriage and conjugal
Vertues, Religion, Detractions, Talkativeness, Impertinent Curiosity, Pride,
Contentment, Retirement, &, Also

The Lady's Library, published by Sir Richard Steele.1

Dr. Jones's dissertation has been subjected to this detailed examination
because, in spite of some few imperfections, it should displace much of the
material in Lounsbury's brilliant but untrustworthy Text of Shakespeare.
The imperfections seem due less to lack of ability on the part of Dr. Jones
than to our American system which frequently imposes as the problem for
a doctoral dissertation a task impossible of achievement in the time ordinarily
allotted to such work.

GEORGE SHERBUBN

UNIVERSITY OP CHICAGO

The Elements of Old English. By SAMUEL MOORE and THOMAS A.

KNOTT. Ann Arbor, Michigan: George Wahr, 1919. Pp.

vii+209.
Historical Outlines of English Phonology and Middle English Grammar.

By SAMUEL MOORE. Ann Arbor, Michigan: George Wahr,

1919. Pp. vii+83.

For nearly thirty years no new textbook for the use of university classes
in elementary Old English has appeared in America. During that period
the best and most widely used book has been a reader with a grammatical
introduction. Because of the brevity and schematic arrangement of the
"Grammar" in that work, the book has not brought about a standardization
of instruction in Old English; in some universities instructors interested in
the scientific study of language have supplemented the "Grammar" by much

i Weekly- Journal or Saturday's- Post, 8 February, 1718; repeated at least eleven
times thereafter.

64 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

detailed information and have given thorough drill in forms and phonology;
but in too many, instructors have been satisfied with mere accuracy and
quantity of translation. The new book of Professors Moore and Knott, if
extensively used, will standardize the teaching of Old English. The first
part ("Elementary Grammar") presents in a series of twenty-four lessons
(each containing paradigms, grammatical explanations, and Old English
text) a thorough survey of the sounds and forms of West Saxon. The
information given is up to date (teachers of Old English will note with
gratitude that at last we have a class book which explains that the so-called
reduplicating verbs are based not on reduplication but on ablaut), and it is
presented with the most painstaking definiteness. Everything that the
student really needs to know is made clear. The last part of the book is a
systematically arranged, succinct " Reference Grammar." The cost of print-
ing unfortunately prevented the authors from providing a body of texts for
reading; for most effective use, the book should be supplemented as soon as
possible with enough texts to give material for the first course in Old English.
The second of the books named above, like the first, is meant for use as
a companion to university and college courses. It is divided into seven
parts: (1) "The Elements of Phonetics," (2) "Modern English Sounds,"
(3) "The Language of Chaucer," (4) "The History of English Sounds,"
(5) "Historical Development of Middle English Inflections," (6) "Middle
English Dialects," (7) "Middle English Spelling." At first glance the
series of headings may seem heterogeneous and lacking in unity or plan.
Careful reading of the book, however, shows that its plan is logical and that
the book can be profitably used in connection with almost any course (not
too advanced) in the history of the English language. Its chief functions
appear to be to give a concise, accurate body of fundamental information
and to afford a means for correlating courses in Old, Middle, and Modern
English, or widening the scope of any one course so as to make the student
comprehend the whole history of our language. As in the case of The
Elements of Old English, this book is up to date in its information and pre-
sents its material in the simplest and clearest terms. Professor Moore is to
be congratulated on his phonetic alphabet, which looks to be comprehen-
sible to an elementary student and successful as a means for the fairly exact
recording of English and American sounds.

J. R. H.

Modern Philology

VOLUME XVIII

June IQ2O

NUMBER 2

THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN HERDER'S THOUGHT. I

THE PRINCIPLE OF PERSONALITY

In the work of a writer who has produced a deep and far-reaching
effect on the ideas and tendencies of his own and succeeding genera-
tions, and who is universally recognized as one of the few principal
authors of an epoch in the history of civilization, there must have
been acting, within the many contradictions imbedded in particular
conclusions, within the endless modifications and concrete adapta-
tions caused by the fortunes of a busy life and the pull and push of
his environment by which is brought forward a constant stream of
interests and inhibitions, and within the temporary and superficial
bewilderments and perplexities as to methods of procedure, by which
every pathfinder is beset — there must have been acting in all this
diversity of mental effort a significant individual force, which, no
matter how complex, can be expressed in a term of unity. As in the
work of Herder's philosophical contemporary and early teacher,
Kant, this term is found as the systematic criticism of the analytic
reason, conceived as an absolute standard of knowledge; and in that
of his poetical contemporary and early disciple, Goethe, in the spon-
taneous and harmonious response of all the faculties, emotional,
imaginative, and intellectual, to the important concrete realities of
life; so there must be attainable an integral conception of Herder,
which may be regarded as the proper focus in which all the elements
of his immensely rich product of ideas are joined.

65] 1 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, June, 1920

IS"

2 MARTIN SCHUTZE

It is with the mental character of Herder that we are concerned.
That there is need for further study of this subject, there is no doubt.
The monumental work of Haym, which will continue for many years
to be the classic biography of Herder, limits itself in its theoretical
parts to relating Herder to the chief currents of systematic philos-
ophy, particularly the rationalism of Leibnitz and Kant. This
method of orientation fixes the focus of the account outside of Her-
der's thought, so that the latter's ideas appear as secondary forms of
systems which have their unities in other minds, of which Herder
inevitably appears as a more or less imperfect variant. No matter
how sympathetic and large-minded such an account — and that of
Haym is admirably so — it cannot present Herder's thought as an
integral whole. It gives many of its principal aspects, but not as
the expressions of the unified mental character, Herder, but rather
as so many individual particulars plucked from, now this, now that,
feature of the theoretical minds of various systematic philosophers.

It was perhaps in recognition of some of the shortcomings of
this method, to which, however, he paid a disappointing allegiance
in his introduction to Herder's Ideen1 that Professor Ktihnemann
attempted to account for Herder's thought by his personality. He
apparently did not realize that personality conceived as prior to
mind — for it cannot be conceived as productive of mind unless it be
prior to it — is devoid of meaning. Personality implies an indis-
soluble reciprocal union of the two common abstractions, the concrete
person and his mind.

Moreover, such an account, if it could be successful, would not
solve the problem at issue, which is the theoretical unity of Herder's
thought. All the concrete facts of the growth of Herder's personality
become relevant to this problem only through being brought into
its focus. The failure of Professor Kuhnemann's essay lies in his
neither having brought out new essential facts nor having found
the proper focus in which the old facts would acquire more significant
meanings.

Other writers, who will be referred to in their proper places,
limit themselves to relating particular theories of Herder to the

»In Kurschner's National- Litter atur, Vol. LXXVII, 1, 1; see also Eugen Kiihne-
mann, Herder's Personlichkeit in seiner Weltanschauung, Berlin, 1893.

THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN HERDER'S THOUGHT 3

history of kindred theories, without attempting to investigate the
foundations of Herder's thought as a whole.

Herder's dominant intellectual interests and his most potent
critical energies moved in the fields of literature, particularly poetry,
and of art, and in these his principal ideas developed first and with
greatest force and clarity. They entered later, and with less cer-
tainty and authority, though with great energy and comprehension,
the fields of general history, which he regarded as the history of
civilization or the human mind, education, systematic philosophy,
ethics, even politics. He did not apply his original ideas even to
religion, which was his profession, and which for a long time he
even theoretically accepted naively in the form of Lutheran liberal
orthodoxy, until he had done his most important work on literature,
the arts, and history.

It is in these later fields that his thought occasionally suffers
from a certain vagueness and from contradictions in theoretical
construction. Most of his critics, especially those trained in system-
atic philosophy, being more interested in the apparent weightiness
of his later subjects, are inclined to regard these lapses as fundamental
flaws in his thought.

Herder has thus come to be judged an inspirer, a stimulator, a
sort of John in the Wilderness, offering many and fertile suggestions,
and giving, by the fineness of his temper and the richness of his
knowledge and language, a strong and abundant impulse to other
minds, endowed with the more essential gifts of trained critical or
inspired artistical genius, but not as himself the possessor of truly
fundamental powers or the bearer of a definitive message.

Herder's views were arranged, in accordance with his intuitive
and concrete genius, not like those of his later great antagonist, Kant,
in systematic order from clearly defined abstract premises to theoretic
unity, but pragmatically, in concrete progression from one problem
to another which involved embodiments of his principal ideas. The
lack of systematic disposition pertaining to this method has been
generally, though with only partial justice, mistaken for lack of any
essential order, and has produced, even in serious students of Herder,
an impression of fragmentariness and incoherence, which has obscured
the high degree of completeness and consistency of his ideas.

4 MARTIN SCHUTZE

Externally, his ideas are often clothed in the bristling array of
direct and indirect conflict, sometimes with various intellectual
faults of his age, but most often and prominently with the then
ruling rationalistic tendencies in literary and aesthetic theory and
in systematic philosophy, and carry some of the passing debris of
conflict with them. It is necessary to cast aside this now useless
and confusing encumbrance before the underived substance of his
thought comes to the surface.

Since Lessing, at the time of his Laokoon, was the most eminent
representative of aesthetic rationalism (from which he turned almost
immediately afterward, in his Dramaturgic, and still more in the
practice of Emilia Galotti, approaching the position of Herder), and
since Kant remained the leader of philosophical rationalism, it was
natural, even if not in keeping with his true importance, that Herder,
whose ideas were antagonistic particularly to rationalism, should
single them out for his criticisms, and be carried even to the length
of partly presenting his own ideas not in their real positive bearings
on his position, but in the negative and not essential relations of
exceptions to his adversaries7 conclusions and critical methods, with
the result that he suffered the penalty, which the polemical author
never wholly escapes, of having his positive products annexed as mere
amendments to the body of the achievements of others. Even to the
present day the general opinion regarding these critical essays has
not been able to free itself from this illusion of the polemical aspect —
an illusion which is one of the many shapes of that intellectual
Proteus, overgeneralization.1

The first work in which, though limited to a particular aesthetical
problem, there appeared in precise form the ideas whereon his
theories were to rest in his Erstes Kritisches Waldchen, published in the
beginning of 1769, in which he proceeded from a radical criticism of
the conclusions published three years before by Lessing in his Laokoon
to a statement of his own position.

An investigation of Herder's theory should therefore start with
this essay. Since, however, the subject of this study is not Herder's

» See for instance, in addition to those already mentioned, Professor W. G. Howard's
scholarly introduction to his edition of Laokoon, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, (New York,
Holt, 1910), pp. cl, clviii, in which the first Waldchen is regarded chiefly as a criticism of
Lessing's essay; Dr. Priedland, Uber das Verhaltniss von Herder's " Erstem Kritischen
Waldchen" zu Lessing's "Laokoon" (Progr. Bromberg, 1905).

THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN HERDER'S THOUGHT 5

aesthetical theory, but the fundamental complex of ideas underlying
his aesthetical as well as all his other important theories, aesthetical
detail will even in the chapter devoted to that Wdldchen be considered
only as far as it lies in the focus of that complex.

SURVEY OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN
AESTHETICAL THEORIES BEFORE LESSING

The chief importance of Lessing's Laokoon lies in its character as
the most eminent attempt of the eighteenth century to combine the
aesthetical element of the two principal philosophical currents of the
era beginning with the Renaissance, the absolutistic-rationalistic,
and the empirical-psychological, with its variant, the naturalistic-
sensualistic. It foreshadows the attempt, represented by the Kant-
ian philosophy, to. extend this harmonization to the entire field of
knowledge.

The rationalistic elements of Lessing's theory center in the
traditional conception of "imitation" of truth and nature; the
naturalistic-sensualistic, in a changed view of nature and new ideas
regarding the dependence of all knowledge, and consequently, of
the matters and techniques pertaining to poetry and the arts, upon
the functions of the senses.

RATIONALISM IN AESTHETICAL THEORY

The doctrine of "imitation," "mimesis," was first formulated by
Aristotle, who in his Poetics taught that art "imitated" not indeed
the literal details of nature, but more or less generalized conceptions
based on natural realities. This idea entered modern theory through
Vida's and Scaliger's Latin works in which the rules given by Aris-
totle combined with those formulated by Horace were established
as the absolute and ultimate canons of art and poetry.

This doctrine received its classical French form by Boileau,
and thence was taken over into German literature, where it held
sway almost until Lessing. The revolt of the Swiss, Bodmer and
Breitinger, against the French influence as represented by Gottshed,
was not directed against the principle of imitation as such, which
was assumed to rest secure upon the authority of Aristotle, but against

6 MARTIN SCHUTZE

the French rationalistic interpretation of the nature which was to
be imitated.

Boileau identified nature with truth of ideas, reason. According
to him, truth is both nature and the beautiful. "Nothing is beauti-
ful except the true." " Nature is true," et d'abord on la sent, i.e.,
"and nature brings with it its own evidence." The imitation of
this trinity of truth-of-nature-which-is-beauty must, however, not be
literal, yet it must be clothed in sufficient verisimilitude to produce
the "illusion " of reality. But it must not give pain. The imitation
even of things in themselves offensive should give pleasure. The
rules for accomplishing this result are embodied in, and to be derived
from, classical art.

If we ask for a discussion of the meaning of the term beauty,
Boileau answers, that beauty and taste have rules "absolute, uni-
versal, and necessary." This can only mean that they are superior
to any conditions of environment or individuality and cannot be
accounted for on any grounds of concrete empirical experience.
The rationalistic conception excludes from its conception of beauty-
nature-truth the character of individuality.

If we probe this conception farther, we find that it represents
no ascertainable specific substance, but is a formal abstraction drawn
from those works of classical art which have come down to us, and
supported by classical and post-classical aesthetic theory. It is a
conception without any authentic or original foundation. It rests
not on the mental processes of creative art but of formal analysis at
second hand.

Batteux' later doctrine that art should imitate only beautiful
nature is largely a qualification of Boileau's formula.

Boileau's theory embraced the Horatian doctrine, "ut pictura
poesis." For if general ideas are the proper subjects common to all
the arts, there is no reason why the same laws of technique should
not prevail in all.

NATURALISM IN AESTHETICAL THEORY

The naturalistic conception of reality produced two principal
branches. The one, which concerned itself with the objective
substance of nature, had its beginning with Bacon ; the other, which

THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN HERDER'S THOUGHT 7

specialized in the particular sense-processes by which the objective
reality "out there," in accordance with the dualism of that age,
a remnant of the medieval view of life, was supposed to be conveyed
to the mind "in here," started with Locke. This branch is called
in some of its representatives associationistic, in others sensualistic,
philosophy.

Bacon's own purpose was a general natural science which rejected
all a priori methods of generalization and proceeded exclusively by
inductive analysis of nature. But he, too, could not free himself
from the dualistic tradition of medieval theology. He believed, and
Hobbes agreed with him, that only scientific truth was amenable
to reason, but that poetry was ruled by the imagination. While
thus ignoring the Cartesian dualism of conscious mind and dead
matter, which was characteristic of French rationalism and which
underlay the aesthetic theories of Boileau and French classicism,
he in turn established a different dualism in the opposition of a
superior scientific reality, drawn from nature by inductive reasoning,
to an inferior poetical reality pertaining to obscure processes of
the imagination, which were regarded as spontaneous, intuitive,
unanalyzable, irresponsible, and irrelevant to the serious business
of life, and in their entirety, as essentially disparate from those of
"reason."

Bacon and Hobbes, however, laid, without suspecting it, in this
dualism the foundation of a movement which was for a time to
assume far greater dimensions than the scientific movement they
desired to bring about, and which in philosophy throughout the
eighteenth century and beyond, all but overwhelmed it. This was
subjective naturalism. The imagination, once having been acknowl-
edged as the subjective organ for the apprehension and expression
of nature, as the bridge between the inner emotions and the outer
being, came necessarily to be regarded as the exclusive aesthetic
faculty. As the formalism of rationalism, its absoluteness and
emotional poverty, its lack of empirical flexibility, individuality, and
spontaneity, grew less satisfactory through repetition, the absorption
in a subjective, spontaneous, emotional interpretation of nature
became more and more ardent. This reaction is known in the history
of literature, especially in England, Switzerland, France, and

8 MARTIN SCHUTZE

Germany, as the awakening of the nature-sense, the emotional revolt
against rationalism, or the Romantic movement in its more
general sense. It appeared, in one of its least extreme forms, in
Shaftesbury's teaching that the highest test of worth is enthusiasm
embodied in the aristocrat and man of the world, whose emotions
have been trained to the highest degree of refinement. The revolt
gave rise to the doctrine of the original genius as the sole standard
of art and poetry, in Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Com-
position and in Diderot's essays; to the theories on imagination and
native individuality based on English theory and further developed
by Bodmer and Breitinger; to the emphasis put on the passions in
contrast to ideas by Dubos and Diderot; to the ever-growing insist-
ence on individuality and spontaneous impulse as the fundamental
forces of life, which reached its climax in Rousseau. Further, it
became generalized in the transcendentalism of Hamann, Words-
worth, and the Romantic poets and philosophers of Germany, the
Schlegels, Wackenroder, Fichte, Schelling, Novalis, Grillparzer, and
many others, the central idea of which is the absolute unity of nature
and the soul of man in God, and in the conception of all truth as a
unified ecstatic vision of spontaneous beatitudes unspoiled by worldly
contacts. The identity of soul and nature, nature animism, Naturbe-
seelung, is the test of subjective naturalism in all its later forms.1

Compared with the abstract rationalism of the classical school,
this subjective naturalism, with all its chaotic variations, uncer-
tainties, and arbitrariness represented individuality and spontaneity
as opposed to fixed and monotonous conventionality. Boileau's
conception of beauty excludes creative originality both as to content
and form. The poet's and artist's genius is limited to the adapta-
tion of absolute traditional rules and forms of expression to ideas
which have no final roots in his individual experience but in an
impersonal, universal, i.e., extra-individual, absolute realm of truth.
This lack of authenticity, this cold and unimaginative formalism
is the fatal defect of all systems of aesthetic classicism since Aristotle.

* For the details of this development see von Hein, Die Entstehung der neueren
Aesthetik (Stuttgart, Cotta, 1886), Zweiter Abschnitt, pp. 81-271; Malcolm H. Dewey,
Herder's Relation to the Aesthetic Theory of the 18th Century (University of Chicago
Dissertation, George Banta Publishing Co., Menasha, Wis., 1920); W. G. Howard,
Introduction to Witkowski, Georg. Lessing's Werke. Leipzig Bibliographisches Institut'
Vol 4, Einleitung.

THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN HERDER'S THOUGHT 9

The aesthetic angers inherent in subjective naturalism, on the
other hand, are those of the temptations of all subjectivity, which
in its extreme forms leads to a self -centered disregard of objective
reality, to impulsiveness and temperamental wilfulness and ethical
irresponsibility — in short, to all the faults of Romanticism.

From the subjective naturalism of the eighteenth century we
must distinguish the opposite tendency of purely objective natural-
ism, called materialism, which developed simultaneously with the
former, and whose most extreme representatives were de Lamettrie,
Dietrich von Holboch (Systeme de la nature),1 and Helvetius. The
materialists interpret nature as a purely physical mechanism, denying
the reality of the soul, except as a symbol of physical forces. They
are the direct opposite of the Romanticists. The form of nature,
which materialistic art and poetry are supposed to imitate, is a literal
aggregate of physical objects and their properties. The artistic
naturalism which grew out of this movement rapidly succumbed to
the triumph of the subjective-idealistic movement, which was to
dominate European civilization for more than three generations.
But it reappeared by the new scientific vehicle- of evolutionary
biology, in the last generation of the nineteenth century, as a great
force in art and literature.

THE SENSUALISTIC BRANCH OF NATURALISM

The sensualistic, or psychological, branch of naturalistic philos-
ophy had as its chief representatives Condillac and Diderot. Les-
sing was most directly influenced by Diderot, whose "lettre sur les
sourds et les muets" offered a method for the sensualistic attack
on the classical doctrine, "ut pictura poesis."

The sensualistic theory in aesthetics simply meant that since
according to Locke the ideas contained in the mind are not innate
but as it were in accordance with the dualism of the inner and outer
realities peculiar to his age, carried there from the outer world by
the senses, art and poetry must be differentiated in accordance with
the particular sense which governs the means of expression pertaining
to each. Consequently, poetry, which is communicated through

*Cf. Lange, "Geschichte des Materialismus," Windelband, Gesch. d. Phil. (1892),
5. Tell, p. 349.

10 ARTIN SCHUTZE

the ear, must follow some particular order of association determined
by the sense of hearing, and pictorial art, analogously, some particular
order of association related to seeing.1

THE DEVELOPMENT OF HERDER'S CENTRAL IDEA

Lessing begins his argument in Laokoon with the assumption
that the classical Greeks, while they permitted crying as an expression
of pain in poetry, rejected it in sculpture, and that their motives
for acting thus in apparent contradiction were considerations of
beauty. Philoktetes, in Sophocles' drama, Mars, in the Iliad, when
he is wounded by Diomed; Venus, in the Iliad, though but slightly
scratched; Laokoon, in the Aeneid, when attacked by serpents, all
cry out. The Trojans, on the other hand, are forbidden by their
King Priam to cry. Lessing explains this difference by saying that
Homer intended to make us realize the difference in civilization
between Greeks and Trojans. The former could cry and yet retain
their self-control, while the less-civilized Trojans, by giving way to
their feelings, might be demoralized. Lessing adds that the modern
man also refrains from giving free tongue to his feelings; but not,
like the Trojans, from fear of losing his self-possession but from a
deeply fixed habit of self -repression.

In Lessing's view, the fundamental difference between art and
poetry is revealed by a comparison of the late-Greek sculptural
group of the death of Laokoon, the Trojan high priest, who had
warned his people against the wooden horse left by the Greeks,
and of his two sons, in the coils of two serpents sent by Poseidon,
with the passage in the Aeneid by which it had been inspired. In
Virgil's account, Laokoon "lifts a fearful roar to the heavens,"
whereas in the group he is represented as a man who in an agonized
struggle suppresses any outcry or at most emits a groan.

i Since the subject of this essay is not Herder's aesthetic theories but the funda-
mental ideas underlying his view of reality, to which his criticism of Lessing's Laokoon
simply opens the most direct road of approach, a discussion of the numerous theoretic
details pertaining to the doctrine of aesthetic naturalism and sensualism up to Lessing
and Herder, would only tend to disturb the focus of this inquiry.

The principal writers on aesthetic theory are the following: in England, Shaftesbury,
Jonathan Richardson, Joseph Spence, Daniel Webb, James Harris, Hutcheson, Hume,
Edward Young; in Prance, Dubos, Batteaux, Caylus, Condillac, Diderot, Rousseau; in
Germany and German Switzerland, Bodmer and Breitinger, Baumgarten, Winkelma'nn,
Sulzer, and many others. See bibliographical references above, p. 72, footnote; and
Windelband, Gesch. d. Phil. (Freiburg, 1892), 5. Teil, pp. 345 fl.

THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN HERDER'S THOUGHT

If, asks Lessing, men, and even gods cry out in Greek poetry
without loss of dignity, why does the sculptor, who in making the
statue of Laokoon followed the account of Virgil very closely, depart
from the latter in the one particular of the crying? The reason
cannot be in the unbecoming nature of crying as such, but must be
in the difference of the means of expression pertaining to the two
arts of poetry and picture-making. His final answer is that the
Greeks depicted, or, to use his own term derived from Aristotle and
French classical theory, "imitated" only schone Korper. The Greek
artist portrayed nothing except the "beautiful." Crying should not
be depicted in sculpture because it gives the mouth the appearance
of a cavity and distorts the face.

By this principle of formal beauty the Greek sculptor was obliged
to refrain from the representation of certain passions which produce
distortions of face and body, like rage and despair. Wrath has to
be toned down to seriousness, misery to sorrow. When grief is
too strong to be thus reduced to lineaments of beauty, as in the scene
of Agamemnon at the sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia, the Greek
artist veils the father's face.

Herder takes exception to every one of Lessing's generalizations.
Lessing is mistaken in assuming that Homer's heroes generally cry.
Agamemnon, when wounded, convulsively controls himself without
crying, Hector, the Trojan, when struck by a heavy rock, falls in
silence; Menelaus, wounded by an arrow, draws out the weapon
without a sound; Diomed, badly wounded, asks Sthenelus to draw
the arrow from the wound, uttering imprecations against his enemies.
Philoktetes, in Sophocles' play, does not cry lustily, but represses
his pain, giving vent to it only occasionally. Moreover, his pain
is not mainly physical but mental; it is the hopeless desolation of a
life of complete solitude, helpless squalor, want of care, affection, and
fellowship, of all that makes life human. The fifth chapter, which
consists of the analysis of Sophocles' Philoktetes is one of the fine
pieces of literary analysis which abound in Herder's writings.

Pherekles, in the Iliad, when he is caught in flight, clamors
loudly, not because Greek heroes cried customarily, but because
Homer intended to depict him as a coward. Mars, when wounded
by the javelin of Diomed, roars like ten thousand warriors so that

12 MARTIN SCHUTZE

both armies are horrified, not because crying is a general law of
Greek nature, but by virtue of his particular character as the gross,
ferocious god of war raging in battle; and, analogously, Venus,
though barely scratched, sets up a loud and piteous lament, not
because all Greeks did likewise but because she is the tender,
self-indulgent, petted goddess of love.

In thus showing that in Homer and other classical Greek poets
the expression of pain is used as a means of characterization and
not as a general formal convention, and that each different expression
must be considered in its specific elements and relations to the
character uttering it and to the circumstances in which that char-
acter moves, Herder replaces Lessing's rationalistic generalization
by the true principle of individualization, which should dominate
both poetic and artistic analysis.

He applies this principle also to Priam and the Trojans. Priam
forbids his people to weep, not because they are barbarians and must
be kept in an insensate condition, but because he is heroic and tries
to make them realize that they must indulge in no grief while their
native land is invaded.

From this analysis there follows an important conclusion which
Herder draws in a discussion of elegiac poetry (chaps, iii and iv).
In reviewing the poetry of suffering produced by different peoples,
Herder finds that it reveals characteristic differences. For instance,
Ragnor Lodbrog's song of former victories uttered in unbearable
physical torture is characteristic of the ruggedness of the Norse
character. Priam's lament over Hector's body, on the other hand,
is expressive of the more gentle and civilized nature of the Trojan
people. National elegies embody the national spirit of a people.
Herder thus expands his principle of individual personality to that
of a collective, racial, and national personality.

However, Herder continues, while each people has its own indi-
viduality, each is essential to the whole of humanity. It is wrong
to suppose, as Lessing does, that the Greeks alone were truly human.
From this it follows that the Greeks cannot be the sole possessors of
the truth of the beautiful.

Moreover, it is wrong, as Lessing asserts, that the Greeks never
represented anything but beauty. Lessing had said that the Greeks

THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN HERDER'S THOUGHT 13

had never pictured a fury. But, retorts Herder, the Greeks did
depict ugliness. Medusa, with snakes instead of hair, Venus in
Moschus' poem, grieving over the death of Adonis, are abhorrent.
He draws several conclusions, which, while they appear as mere
modifications of Lessing's theory, are in fact new principles. The
permanent characters of the personages of high Greek art, Herder
concedes, were never ugly or terrible, but their passing states of mind
may be both. Secondary characters, however, may be ugly by way
of contrast with the principal ones, as the giants under the chariot
of angry Jove, or Satyrs, Silenus, and Bacchantes surrounding
Bacchus, or the head of Medusa in the shield of Pallas Athene.
So much for the gods. The same is true of the heroes. Thersites
in the Iliad is not merely ridiculous, as Lessing thought, but an ugly,
odious blackguard. Now Herder takes up the picture of Agamemnon
veiling his face at the sacrifice of Iphigenia. Again Herder indi-
vidualizes by showing that Agamemnon does not represent a universal
principle of art, as Lessing thought, but that he acts as the great
king he was. Ajax, or Medea, would have acted differently each in
accordance with his or her individuality.

The additional principle, however, which determines Herder's
discussion of the ugly and underlies that of Agamemnon's veiling
his face, though it is not yet clearly realized by him, is that of the
focus of composition, another form of individualization. This
principle demands the subordination of all secondary factors in a
composition in such a manner that the central idea, character, or
action receives from those factors additional emphasis and signifi-
cance. Thus the Satyrs, Silenus, and Bacchantes are not depicted
for their own sakes, either as ideas or as forms of composition, but
for the purpose of adding meanings and pictorial enrichments
which a single figure of Bacchus could not possibly express. In
the Iphigenia group, she, not Agamemnon, is the focal character,
and the figure of Agamemnon had to be subordinated in the interest
of the unity of the composition.

His principle of individualization gives Herder his standard for
judging the remaining generalizations of Lessing. The roaring of
Laokoon in Virgil's account according to this principle is not as
Lessing assumes good poetry but as faulty there as it would be in

14 MARTIN SCHUTZE

pictorial art. For it is not compatible with the dignity of his char-
acter. It is false individualization. The sculptor of the group, in
giving Laokoon the expression and posture of silent agony, deviated
from Virgil not because the technique of his particular art constrained
him but because in this particular he was the better artist, gifted with
a finer feeling for individuality. The best Greek artists, as is shown
in the example of Philoktetes and many Homeric characters, do not
make their lofty characters roar. Virgil, in the Laokoon scene, loses
himself in externalities of description.

From the principle of individualization as opposed to Lessing's
principle of general imitation of external objects, Herder proceeds
to the formulation of the purpose of art which is higher than that of
formal and abstract beauty. The new purpose which owes its
emergence to the modern interest in nature, is Wahrheit und Ausdruck,
expressive truth or characteristic or individual truth. He did not,
however, now any more than later, go the length of the naturalistic
demands of the Storm and Stress movement for an exclusively char-
acteristic art. Artists, he says, are at all times limited in the full
freedom of expressing the truth as they see it by tradition and
convention. Among the ancients, for instance, the official religion
was one of these limiting forces. It demanded that Bacchus have
horns and so the sculptors of figures of Bacchus gave to the brows
of their beautiful Bacchic youths indications of horns just sufficiently
definite to satisfy traditional religion.

MARTIN SCHUTZE
UNIVERSITY OP CHICAGO

[To be continued]

GERMANIC ^-GEMINATION. I

That w caused far more geminations than is usually admitted
is, I believe, a matter of incontrovertible proof. It is also evident
that the geminations so caused date from various periods. Some
are Primitive Germanic inherited from pre-Germanic; others North or
WGermanic; and others restricted to a single dialect. The reason
of this is because the w did not always come in contact with the pre-
ceding consonant. Given the right conditions an IE. py, in a w-stem
might produce Germ, pp, ff, bb, /, 6, or by analogy even p. Such
parallel forms are very common, especially those with pp, bb; tt, dd;
kk, gg, beside those with single consonants. Naturally when such
parallel forms were once established, they were greatly multiplied
by analogy. This was especially true of the verbs in pp, tt, kk,
which came to have an iterative or intensive force.

Many examples of consonant lengthening have been wrongly
attributed to n. We may properly exclude from Germ, n-gemina-
tions all words in which the loss of n cannot be explained. Even
if OHG. chnappo, chnabo represent double paradigms from an
original nom. *knabo, gen. pi. *knctf):bno (cf. Brugmann, Gr., I2, 715);
ON. skabb, OE. sceabb l scab ' cannot be referred to a Germ. *sfca55na-,
for in that case the n would have remained, just as I and r remain
where they cause gemination. Much less can such forms as OHG
fethdhah be explained as n-geminations. It is not here denied that
n is responsible for many geminations: pp, tt, kk, this being a Prim.
Germ, or pre-Germ. process in which the n was assimilated or
absorbed. But in the later Germ, such a process cannot be claimed
(with the exception noted above) in face of Goth, rign, taikns, wepn,
and many similar forms in N. and W. Germ.

A ^-gemination may be suspected wherever related -yo-, ey,o-,
or w-stems are found. In some instances the w-stem remains in
Germ., as in ON. hottr from *qaty-, *qatu-, with the tt generalized
just as we have nn in Goth. kinnusiGr. yews.

79] 15 [MODBBN PHILOLOGY, June, 1920

16 BRANCIS A. WOOD

The w- geminations are here divided into two groups: Prim.
Germ, words with pp, mm, it, kk; and other, in most cases later,
geminations of the labials, dentals, and gutturals. In the first
group pp comes from IE. -py,-, -bh^-; tt from -ty,-, -dhy,-; kk from
velar or palatal -ku-, -ghy,-. These gemmations must have taken
place in pre-Germ. The process was about as follows: IE. -py,±,
pre-Germ. pp-, Germ. 66 (stop not spirant), later pp; IE. -bhy,-,
pre-Germ. bbh, Germ. 66, pp. Similarly with the dentals and
gutturals. The gemination nn from ny, is here omitted as it is
generally admitted.

In the second group are included the geminations ff, pp, hh
(which may have been inherited from pre-Germ. -pp-, -U-, -kk-,
but more probably arose in Germ, from -fw- etc.) ; pp, it, kk (which
are likewise ambiguous, since they might proceed from pre-Germ.
66, dd, gg from by,, etc., or might have originated in Germ, or later
from Germ, py, etc., to which the evidence in many cases points);
and 66, dd, gg, which must have come from Germ, or later fiw, &w, gw.

IE. -py,-, -6%-:GEKM. -pp-

1. OE. upp(e) 'up/ ON. upp, uppi, OS. upp, up, OE. up, OHG.
uf, Goth, iup, pre-Germ. *upy,a-, *eupy,a-: Lesb. hvrv, Lat. s-uppus
(*supvos) ; Gr. ux6, Skt. upa, Goth, uf, OHG. oba. For the appended
u compare Lesb. airv, ON. ofugr 'verkehrt/ OS. afouh, OHG. abuh,
abur, abo:aba 'ab'; Goth. ibuks:ib~; Av. anu'.ana; Goth, inn,
probably from *eny,a : in, Gr. &.

2. OE. Iceppa Hag, end, skirt; lobe (of ear, liver); district/
OLG. lappe 'Zipfel eines Kleides/ MLG. lappe 'Stuck, Fetzen
Tuches oder Leders; das weiche Bauchfleisch der Tiere/ etc.,
*hpuon- 'flat piece, flap': Lat. lappa (*lapvd), Czech lopun, lopoun
'Klette/ lopdc 'flache Schaufel/ Slov. lopdr, Serb.-Cr. lopar 'Back-
schaufel, Schieber/ LRuss. lopdr 'Spatel zum Lehmkneten/ OE.
Icefer 'thin plate of metal; bulrush/ N.E. dial, liverack 'the English
iris; the bulrush.' Cf. Nos. 46, 51.

3. MDu. ruppe, rupe 'Raupe/ MLG. rupe idem, roppen 'rupfen,
zupfen/ MDu. roppen, ruppen 'pluck at, tear off; eat greedily/
MHG. rupfen, ropfen, Germ. *rupp-, pre-Germ. *rupu-:Lith.

GERMANIC ^-GEMINATION 17

rupus 'grob, uneben, rauh/ rupuzv 'Krote/ Lett, rupuzis idem,
rupuls 'em grobes Stuck Holz; ein Grobian/ Pol. rupic 'bite/
rypac 'scindere, friare/ OE. reofan 'break, tear/ etc. Cf. No. 53.

4. MDu. rappe, MHG. rapfe 'Kratze, Raude/ OHG. raphen,
NHG. dial, rapfen ' verharschen/ OHG. raffi 'rauh/ Germ. *rapp-,
rep-, pre-Germ. *ropy,-, repy,:No. 54.

5. MDu. MLG. stoppe, stoppel 'Stoppel/ MHG stupfe, stupfel,
OHG. stupfila idem., stupf, stopfo, stopfa 'Punkt, Tupf, stimulus/
stupfen 'leicht bertihrend stossen, stacheln, antreiben/ MLG.
stoppel 'Stachel/ Germ. *stupp-, pre-Germ. *stupy,-, whence also with
later assimilation Germ. *stubb- from *s£w5w-:ON. stubbr, stubbe,
'stub/ ME., MLG. stubbe idem, NE. stubbleiGr. (rrvinnj 'tow/ Lett.
stupure, stups 'das nachgebliebene Ende von etwas Gebrochenem/
ON. stufr 'Stumpf/ etc.

Here also I would add, as genuine Germ, words, OE. for-stoppian
'stop up, close/ OLG. stuppon, MDu., MLG. stoppen 'stop up, stop/
OHG. stopfon 'pungere/ MHG. NHG. stopfen, Germ. *stuppon,
-djan 'stuff, stop up; stop/ pre-Germ. *stupy,d- sm.d *stupy,o- in Germ.
*stuffa-, *stufwa- 'Stoff/ whence Ital. stoffa, stoffo, OFr. estoffe, Fr.
etoffe, with reborrowing in Germ.

6. Norw. duppe 'tauchen/ OE. dyppan 'dip', baptize/ doppettan
'dive, plunge (of water-birds)/ MDu. doppen 'dip, sop, eintunken/
Germ. *dupp~; *dubw-:M.LG. dobbe 'Niederung, Vertiefung; Sumpf/
MDu. dobbe 'pit, ditch/ dobben, dubben 'immerse, duck; deepen, dig/
NE. dial, dub 'puddle, small pool of foul, stagnant water'; MHG.
tobel 'Vertiefung, Waldtal/ OE. dufan 'dive/ etc. Or the forms
with pp may come from Germ. -pw-:Lith. dubus 'tief und hohl/
Goth, diups 'deep.;

7. MDu. dop(pe) 'dish, pot; pod, shell, but always of something
more or less round; top; stud, brooch/ MLG. dop(pe) 'Schale, bes.
von Eiern, Kapsel, Kelch,Topf; Kreisel; Knopf / ON. doppa ' Knopf /
Norw. dial, dupp 'Biischel, Wipfel/ MHG. topfe, topf 'Kreisel,
turbo/ topf 'Topf, Hirnschale/ Germ. *dupp- 'whirl, roll, any round
object/ probably from pre-Germ. *dhubhy,-:Gr. TW/KOS 'turbo, whirl-
wind/ ™0or arrives Hes. (cf. Mod. Phil, XI, 332):Norw. dial, dubb
'Bolzen/ Swed. dubb 'Zapfen/ MDu. dobbe 'plug, stopper/ NHG.
Tyrol. tupp9 'large chunk of wood/ Germ. *dubw-:M.HG. tubel

18 FRANCIS A. WOOD

'Klotz, Pflock, Zapfen, Nagel,' MLG. dovel 'Zapfen,' etc. (cf. Fick,
I4, 466).

8. ON. hnappr 'Schale, Trog,' OE. hncepp 'cup, bowl/ OHG.
hnapf 'Napf,' Germ. *hnappa- 'compact mass, chunk,' OSwed.
napper 'knapp,' ON. hneppr idem (*hnappia-), hneppa 'klemmen,
drangen,' OE. hnceppan 'strike (against),' pre-Germ. *qnabhy,-:
Lith. knabus 'langfingerig, diebisch; geschickt,' Gr. Kva<j>evs 'carder,
fuller,' Kvafavw 'card, full,' Kvairru 'scratch, scrape; tease, card or
comb wool; mangle, tear,' Lith. knab&ti 'abschalen,' ON. hnof
'schnitt ab.'

9. Norw. knapp 'enge, kurz, knapp,' LG. knapp, 'gering kurz,
sparlich, rasch,' ON. knappr 'Knorren, Knopf,' OE. cncepp 'top,
mountain-top; brooch,' probably from pre-Germ. *gnabhy,-, *gnabhu-
(parallel with No. 8), whence Germ. *knappa- in the above and
*knal)wa(n)- in Norw. dial. knabb(e) 'Knollen, Bergknollen,' Swed.
dial, knabbe 'Klotziges,' OHG. knappo 'Knabe,' knabo idem., OE.
cnafa 'boy; servant,' NE. knave 'a mean, low person,' NHG. dial.
knabe 'Stift, Keil.'

10. LG. kippen 'wanken, schwanken, umwerfen/ NHG. dial.
kipfen 'kippen,' kipfe 'Spitze,' Germ. *kipp~, pre-Germ. *0zM#-:Lat.
gibbus 'nach aussen gewolbt,' gibbus, gibba 'Buckel, Hocker' (*gib-
vos):Liih. geibus 'plump, ungeschickt,' Lett, geibulis, glbulis
'Schwindel, Ohnmacht,' geibt, glbt ' schwindelig, ohnmachtig werden,'
Norw. dial, keiv 'schief, gedreht, verkehrt,' keiva 'linke Hand,'
keiv} keiva 'linkische, unbeholfene Person,' keiven 'klotzig, unbe-
holfen, plump,' etc. (cf. Walde,2 340; Persson, Beitr., 83f.).

Root *gei- 'bend, turn' parallel with *0ew-:Norw. kima 'sich
drehen, wiegen,' keima 'sich seitwarts biegen, den Kopf schief halten;
schwingen, hin und her schweben'; ON. keikia 'den Oberkorper
ruckwarts biegen,' keikr 'mit zuriickgebogenem Oberkorper,' kikna
'sich ruckwarts biegen,' Norw. klka 'look at anything, esp. to turn
or stretch to look,' Swed. kika 'schielen, gucken'; Icel. keis 'runder
(ausgebogener) Magen,' Norw. dial, keis 'Biegung, Krummung,'
keisa ' bogen-f ormige, krumme Bewegungen machen,' kls 'Buckel
(an Kleidern, Schuhen),' kisa 'schielen, blinzeln' (cf. Persson,
Beitr., 87), NHG. Swiss chiren 'nach einer Seite neigen, z.B. von
einem Wagen,' MHG. keren, OHG. keran, cherren (*kaizian or
*kairiari) 'kehren, (um)wenden, eine Richtung geben.'

GERMANIC W-GEMINATION 19

11. OE. cuppe 'cup/ copp 'summit/ coppede 'having the top
cut off, polled/ ator-coppe 'spider/ ON. koppr 'Tasse, Napf, halb-
kugelformige Erhohung/ MLG. kop, koppe 'Becher/ kop 'Kopf;
Schropfkopf/ koppen 'kopf en, den Kopf, die Spitze abschlagen/
MDu. coppen idem, coppe 'round top, crown of the head; spider/
OHG. kopf 'Becher, Hirnschale, Kopf/ ON. kupottr 'rund, kegel-
formig,' Norw. dial, kup ' Ausbauchung, Hocker/ Germ. *kuppa-,
*kupa-, pre-Germ. *gubhy,o- : Lat. *gubbus 'humpback' (cf. Walde2,
340), Icel. kufr 'rundlicher Gipfel/ ON. kufungr ' Schneckenhaus/
Du. fcw/'Haube, Federbusch, Wipfel.'

12. OE. cipp 'log, trunk; plowshare; weaver's beam/ NE.
chip ' a small fragment of wood, stone, or other substance, separated
by a cutting instrument/ verb 'cut into small pieces, hack away;
break or fly off in small pieces/ MLG. kippen 'ausbriiten/ WFal.
iitkippen 'ausschlagen (von Baumen)/ Flem. kippen 'ausschlagen,
geboren werden, kalbern/ ON. kiappe 'Ziegenbock/ OS. kip 'stock/
OHG. kipfa 'Runge/ ON. keipr 'Kerbe (fiir das Ruder)/ MLG.
kep 'Kerbe/ Germ. *kipp-, *kaip~, 'split, burst, sprout, hatch, etc.,
pre-Germ. gibhy,-, goibhy,, probably identical with the following.
Compare the root *gei- in Goth, keinan 'keimen/ OE. cinan 'gape,
crack/ tinu 'chink'; OHG. kimo 'Keim'; kldi 'Schossling, Spross/
NHG. Swiss chlden 'keimen/ ON. fodT 'kid/ OHG. kizzi 'Kitz';
OHG. kll 'KeiP; EFris. klsen 'sich spalten, klaffen, gahnen, gaffen.'

13. ON. kippa, 'heftig riicken, haschen, schnappen/ 'pull, jerk/
kippask um eitt 'um etwas streiten,' NIcel. kippast viti 'make a
sudden motion, startle/ kippur 'pull, jerk; shock/ OSwed. kippa
'raffen/ Swed. kippa efter andan 'nach Luft schnappen/ MDu.
kippen 'catch, trap/ kippe 'trap, snare/ Norw. dial, kipa 'huschen,
hupfen, rasche Bewegungen machen/ klpen ' ausgelassen, wild/
Swed. dial. kipa ' nach Luft schnappen/ MDu. klpen 'sich anstrengen/
N.E. chipper 'active, lively, brisk; cheerful; pert/ dial, kipper
'light, nimble, frisky, in good spirits; eager/ etc., Germ. *kipp~,
kip-, probably pre-Germ. *glbhy,-:ON. kifa 'zanken/ kif 'Zank,
Streit/ MLG. kwen 'zanken, streiten/ MHG. kiben idem., kibelen
'scheltend zanken/ kippen 'schlagen, stossen'; OE. cdf 'prompt,
active, bold/ Lett, fibet (zucken, vibrare) 'blitzen, glanzen/ Lith.
£ib&ti 'glanzen, glanzend strahlen, schimmern/ ziburys 'Licht,
Fackel/ zibute 'Flitter/ zaibas 'Blitz' (cf. Uhlenbeck, Got. Wb.2, 177).

20 BRANCIS A. WOOD

Compare the root *gei- in the following: Bal. zinaj 'an sich
reissen, hastig ergreifen, mit Gewalt wegnehmen/ Av. zinat, OPers.
a-dind 'nahm weg/ Skt. jindti 'raubt, beraubt, bedriickt/ jyanam
'Bedriickung/ Av. zyamm 'Schaden/ Swed. dial, kia 'nach Luft
schnappen/ Norw. dial, klkja, kikna 'palpitare, keuchen/ MHG.
klchen idem, OE. cidan 'quarrel, complain; blame, chide/ gecid
'strife/ ON. kitask 'zanken, streiten/ kima 'spotten/ kiminn 'spot-
tend/ Swed. dial, kisa 'sich anstrengen/ kesa 'biesen/ Norw. dial.
keisa 'laufen, biesen/ etc.

IE. -W#-:GERM. -mm-

14. Goth, faurdammjan 'verdammen, hindern/ ON. dammr
'dam/ etc., Germ. *damma-, pre-Germ. *dhdmyo- : Gr. *0a/zvs,
pi. ^a/tees 'crowded, close, thick/ 0ajuea>s, 6a^a 'together, in crowds;
often.' The usual explanation that dam is from *dh9mno- is inad-
missible.

15. ME. NE. clam 'sticky, viscous, clammy/ verb 'smear,
daub; stick, glue/ MDu. Du. klam 'moist, clammy/ etc., Germ.
*klamma-, pre-Germ. *grfom#-:Gr. *7\a/xu- in 7Xa/zupos 'blear-eyed/

s idem (for *7Xajuu-/zi;fos) ; y\aiJ,r) 'humor in the eyes/
'blear-eyed/ etc.

16. ON. suimma, suamm, summenn 'swim' and suima, suam,
sumenn come from original suimma, suam, etc., pre-Germ. *sy,emy,o,
*suome.

17. OE. grimm 'cruel, fierce/ grimman 'rage/ ON. grimmr
'grimmig/ OS. grimman 'toben/ etc., may have mm from my,, in
the verb primarily only in the present :Gr. xpe/wAos,

IE. -ty-, -dhu-t-'.GERu. -tt-

18. ON. knottr 'Kugel, Ball/ Germ, stem *knattu-, pre-Germ.
*gnotu-, Norw. knott 'kurzer und dicker Korper, Knorren':ON.
knoda 'drlicken, kneten/ etc.

19. ON. hottr, OE. Imtt 'hat/ from *hattu-, pre-Germ. *qaty-:
Lat. cappa 'cap/ *qatua (cf. Class. Phil, XIV, 261).

20. OE. clott 'lump/ NE. clot, MDu. clotte, MHG. kloz 'klumpige
Masse, Kugel/ NHG. klotz; MLG. klut(e) 'Erdklumpen, clod/ ON.

GEKMANIC W-GEMINATION

klutr 'Lumpen, clout,' OE. dut ' piece of cloth, clout, patch; metal
plate;' MLG. klot, MDu. cloot 'clump, lump, ball,' OHG. kloz 'rund-
licher Klumpen,' NHG. klosz, NE. cleat, Germ. *klutta-, kluta-,
klauta- with -tt-, -t- from pre-Germ. -dhu- or -ty-:ME. clodde 'clod/
cloud 'a mass of rock; cloud,' OE. dud 'rock,' Russ. gluda 'Klumpen,
Kloss,' Slov. gluta 'Beule, beulenartige Geschwulst,' Gr. y\ovr6s
'rump, buttocks,' TO, y\ovna 'buttocks; two lobes of the brain.'

21. MHG. statzen 'aufrecht sitzen, sich briisten; stammeln,
stottern,' Germ. *statt-, pre-Germ. *stefy4-:ON. stpfiua 'stop, check/
Lith. status 'steil; unhoflich/ Lat. statuo 'set, establish; raise,
erect.' Cf. No. 64.

22. OE. laett 'lath/ OS. latta, MDu. latte idem, Germ. *latto,
pre-Germ. *btua:MHG. lade 'Brett, Bohle, Laden/ etc. Cf. No. 65.

23. OE. mattoc 'mattock/ OHG. steinmezzo 'Steinmetz/ Germ.
*matt-, pre-Germ. *ma^:OBulg. moty-ka 'Hacke.'

24. ON., MLG. motte 'moth/ Germ. *muttan-, pre-Germ.
*mutyon-:QN. raoft 'Schabsel, Schrot/ Cf. No. 66.

25. OE. cottuc 'mallow/ formed from a Germ. *kutta- bunch,
'tuft/ also in OS. kot (pi. kottos) 'grobes, zottiges Wollenzeng, Decke
oder Mantel davon/ OHG. choz, chozzo idem, umbi-chuzzi 'Ober-
gewand':OE. codd 'bag; husk/ etc. Cf. No. 70.

26. OE. doit 'speck, head (of boil)/ NE. dot, EFris. dott 'Biischel,
Haufen, Zotte/ Norw. dott 'Wisch, kleiner Haufen/ MDu. dotten,
dutten 'verriickt sein/ MLG. vordutten 'verwirren/ MHG. ver-
tutzen 'betaubt werden/ getotzen 'schlummern/ etc., Germ. *dutt-,
pre-Germ. *dhudhy,-: ME. dudd(e) 'a coarse cloak/ NE. duds,
LG. dudel ' herabhangender Flitter an Kleidungsstiicken/ Gr.
Bvaavos 'tassel, tag, tuft' (MLN, 22, 235). Cf. No. 68.

27. OE. plcett 'blow with flat hand, smack/ plcettan l smack,
strike with open hand/ Swed. dial, platta 'schlagen, klatschen'
Germ. *platt-, pre-Germ. *6Za^-:Lat. blatuo, blatio, blatero 'babble,
prate/ MLG. pla(d)dern 'plappern/ EFris. pladdern 'ein plat-
schendes oder klatschendes Gerausch machen.'

28. ON. pottr, OE. pott 'pot/ Norw. dial, pott 'small cushion';
EFris. put 'Geschwulst, Beutel, Sack/ Du. puit 'frog/ puit-aal, OE.
cele-puta 'eel-pout/ Germ, -tt-, -t- from pre-Germ. -dhy,- or -du-:
MDu. podde 'toad' (No. 74), OE. pudoc 'wen, wart/ Germ. *puduka-

22 FRANCIS A. WOOD

'swelling/ Lat. dial, bufo 'toad/ *budho; buda 'sedge/ Gr. &v$bv
irvKvbv, (rvveTov, yavpov de KCLI jj,eya Hes.

29. MDu., MLG. stutten 'stiitzen, absteifen/ OHG. stutzen,
MHG. stutzen, *stuttian with -it- from pre-Germ. -£#-:OE. studu,
stupu 'stud, pillar, buttress/ MHG. stud 'Stutze, Pfosten/ OE.
stod 'post/ ON. styfiia ' stutzen. '

30. Goth, skatts 'piece of money, money/ ON. skattr 'tribute,
tax/ OE. sceatt 'coin, money; property; tribute, rent/ OFris.
sket Geld, Vieh/ OS. scat 'Geldmiinze, Geld, Besitz/ OHG. scaz
'Miinze, Geld, Reichtum, Schatz/ Germ. *skatta~, pre-Germ.
*skh9tuo- 'piece: coin, money; property : cattle ' (cf. Nos. 61, 76).
The meaning 'cattle' might have developed directly from ' strip t,
fleeced/ with reference to the animals whose hides or fleece were
stripped or pulled off. In this sense may be derived Germ. *skepa-
' sheep/ pre-Germ. *skhe-bo- 'stript or fleeced animal.' For mean-
ing compare ON. fcer ' sheep ':Gr. TTOKOS 'fleece/ TT&O) 'strip, pull
off, clip, shear/ and IE. *petcu 'pecu, pecunia.' Compare *skhe-go-
in Skt. chagah 'Bock,' chaga ' Ziege ': OFris. skak 'Beute, Raub;
(what is stripped off), MLG. schak idem, OHG. scah 'Rauberei,
Raub/ scahhari 'Rauber/ OFris. skeka 'rauben/ MLG. schaken idem,
Germ. *skek- ' strip : rob/and *skak- 'strip, piece, point' in OHG.
scahho 'promontorium/ scahho meres 'Landzunge/ ON. skekill idem.

The explanation of Goth, skatts as from *skh9tuo- would seem to
be inadmissible in view of Goth, fidwor 'four': Skt. catvarah. But
fidwor may be rather from *q*etuu6res becoming later *pety,6res
(with p from *penqve 'five'). Compare Lat. quattuor, quattw, for
*quatuor, quattor.

31. ME. smiten 'cast, smite; go/ MDu. smiten Du. smijten
'schmeissen, werfen/ MHG. smlzen 'schmeissen/ etc. may come from
pre-Germ. *smeituo, properly only in the present, becoming Germ.
*smito, with t generalized: Lat. mitto (cf. Walde2, 489) from *smeituo.
Compare with tt MHG. smitzen 'etwas Spitziges schnell bewegen;
geisseln, hauen/ intr. 'eilig gehen, laufen/ smitze 'Hieb, Streich/
etc. and Goth, gasmipon 'schmieden.'

In this case the above cannot be directly compared with Goth.
bismeitan l bestreichen, beschmieren/ OE. smitan 'smear/ Norw.
smita 'bestreichen/ smiten ' einschmeichelnd/ etc.: Lett, smaidtt

GERMANIC W-GEMINATION 23

'schmeicheln,' smaida 'Lacheln,' Gr. ^etSdco 'smile,' etc. (cf. Mod.
Phil., IV, 496 f.).

IE. -qy-, -%-, -#%-, -#%-:GERM. -kk-

32. Norw. /afcfca (*lakkori) 'hiipfen, trippeln,' MLG. lecken
(*lakkiari) 'mit den Fiissen hintenausschlagen,' MHG lecken 'mit
den Fiissen ausschlagen, springen, hiipfen,' pre-Germ. *laqy,-
'bend':ON. leer, Swed. tor 'Schenkel' (*lahwaz), OE. Zeow 'thigh,
ham' (*legwaz), Lat. laqueus 'noose, snare,' ChSl. lak&tl 'Ellen-
bogen,' Gr. Xa/crtfo? 'kick, stamp or trample on; struggle convulsively,
quiver, throb,' etc. (cf. Fick, III4, 357).

33. ON. rokkr 'Oberkleid, Rock,' OE. rocc, OFris. rokk, MDu.
rock, MLG. rock (and roch), OHG. roc (-ck-, -cch-) idem, Germ.
*rukka-, pre-Germ. *ruqy,o- 'hide with the hair on':OE. ryhce, reowe
'blanket, rug,' OLG. rugi, ruwi 'rauhes Fell, grobe Decke.'

34. ME. rokken (and roggeri) 'rock,' NE. rock 'move backward
and forward, cause to sway, cause to totter,' OHG. rucch 'geschwinde
Fortbewegung,' rucchen 'fort-, wegbewegen,' MHG. rucken, rucken,
rocken, MLG. rucken, ON. rykkia 'pull, jerk, wrench,' rykkr 'pull,
jerk,' etc., Germ. *rukk~, pre-Germ. *rw%-:Lith. ruszus 'tatig,
geschaftig, arbeitsam/ ruszanti 'tatig sein, sich beschaftigen/
ruszyti 'antasten,' ruszinti 'bertihren,' root *reu- 'ruere.' Cf.
No. 104.

35. ON. skykkr 'undulatory motion,' OLG. skokk 'schaukelnde
Bewegung,' MLG. schucke 'Schaukel,' schocken 'sich bin und her
bewegen, zittern,' ME. shokken, NE. shock 'strike against suddenly
and violently; strike as with indignation, horror, or disgust; cause
to recoil, as from something astounding, appalling, hateful, or
horrible,' Germ. *skukk-, pre-Germ. *sququ-:M~E>. shoggen 'shock/
etc. No. 102.

36. OE. sciccels, sciccing, scincing 'cloak,' ON. skikkia 'Uber-
wurf, Mantel,' OHG. scecho (*sceccho) 'stragulum,' MHG. schecke
'Leibrock, Panzer,' MLG. schecke 'Warns fur Kriegsleute,' pre-
Germ. *sqe(ri)qy,- : Skt. kancukah 'Panzer, Warns, Mieder,' Gr.
irodoKCLKKr) ' stocks for the feet; Norw. dial, skaak (*skek-) 'Gabel-
deichsel,' ON. skokull idem (perhaps with analogical k for kk), OE.
scacol 'shackle,' etc. (cf. Fick, III4, 447).

24 FRANCIS A. WOOD

37. MHG. bemchen 'sich neigen, sinken/ nicken 'beugen; sich
neigen, nicken/ MLG. nicken ' niederbewegen, bes. von den Augen,
blinzeln, conivere/ Germ. *hmk-, hnikk-, pre-Germ. *gn!$%- (not
*qmgvh-):Goth. hneiwan, OE. hnigan 'bend down, sink down/ Lat.
conlveo 'close (the eyes), blink; be darkened/ Gr. Ki>uf>6s, <TKi>lcf>6s
'dark, overcast, dim; dim-sighted, purblind/ vKvufrbu 'darken, make
dim ' (with <£ from ghy,- or bh) .

38. EFris. prakken 'pressen, driicken, quetschen, kneten/ Germ.
*prakk-, pre-Germ. *broghy,-:Gr. Ppaxw 'small, short, trifling/
*brghu- 'compressed/ Goth, ana-praggan 'bedrangen/ MHG.
phrange "Einengung, Einschliessung/ phrengen 'pressen, drangen,
bedrucken/ NHG. Bav. pfreng 'eng/ Cf. No. 105.

IE. -&#-:GERM. -pp-

39. OHG. scaph, scapf (and scaf) 'Gefass fiir Fliissigkeiten/
MHG. schapfe (and schaffe) ' Schopfgef ass/ ON. skeppa 'Scheffel'
(*skappidn~), MLG. schap gen. schappes 'Schrank, um Geld, Speise,
Kleider etc. aufzubewahren/ MDu. schappigh, schappelick 'bene
formatus, formosus, compositus, decens, speciosus/ Germ. *skapp-,
pre-Germ. *sqaby,- : Lett, skabufis 'Hundestall; Abteilung im Stalle
zum Aufbewahren des Viehf utters; ein altes Gebaude;' OS. scap
'Schaff, Bottich, Scheffel, Boot/ skepil 'Scheffel/ Goth, gaskapjan
'schaffen/ etc., root *sqab- 'cut, hew: shape, make; hollow out.'
Compare *sqabh- in No. 55 and in Gr. OTCCU^OS 'a digging; trench,
ditch; tub; hull of a ship, ship, V/ca^jur/ 'hole, trench; trough, tub,
bowl; boat/ etc.

40. OHG. scop} (and scof), MHG. schopf (schof) 'Gebaude ohne
Vorderwand, Scheune/ LG. schupp 'Wetterdach/ OE. scoppa
'shed, booth/ NE. shop, Germ. *skuppa-, pre-Germ. *squby,-, per-
haps formed as a rime-word to the preceding from the root *squ-
' cover.' Or from a base *squb(h)- 'cut, shape/ as above :Gr. <TKV<{>OS
'cup, can/ (TKv<f>lov 'cup; skull.'

41. OSwed. skuppa skoppa 'springen, laufen/ Norw. dial.
skuppa 'stossen/ MLG. schuppen 'stossen, fortstossen/ MHG.
schiipfen 'in schwankende Bewegung bringen, stossen/ schupfen
'in schwankender Bewegung sein/ Germ. *skupp~, pre-Germ.

GERMANIC WJ-GEMINATION 25

*squb(h)y,-:'Lith. skubus 'geschwind/ Swed. dial, skopa 'hiipfen/
ON. skopa 'springen, laufen'; Goth, -skiuban 'schieben/ etc.

42. OHG. scoph (and scof) 'Dichter/ scoph, scop} 'Gedicht,
Spott/ MHG. schopfen 'dichten/ MDu. schoppen 'spotten/ Germ.
*skupp- or *skupw- pre-Germ. *squby,-, also in Norw. skopp 'Schale/
root squb- ' vellere ' : OBulg. skubati 'vellere/ Pol. skubac 'zupfen,
rupfen/ Gr. (TKv(3a\ov 'off-scouring, filth, refuse/ ovcu/3aXifo> 'reject,
treat contemptuously/ ON. skop 'Spott/ skopa 'spotten/ skaupa
idem. Cf. No. 41.

43. OHG. sfop/ 'Ausgleiten, Fall/ 8Ztp/en 'ausgleiten/ MLG.
slippen 'gleiten, gleiten lassen; einschneiden, schlitzen, zerreissen/
MDu. slippen 'slip; slit/ etc., Germ. *slipp- or *slipw-, pre-Germ.
*sh'6^-:Lat. delibuere 'benetzen; streichen'; dellbare ' abstreichen,
abbrechen/ OHG. sllffan, MLG. slipen 'gleiten, schleichen; schleifen,
scharf machen.'

IE. -P#-:GERM. -ff-

44. OE. maffa 'caul/ 'Fetthaut um die Darme/ Germ. *mafwan-:
Lat. mappa 'napkin; signal-cloth/ probably a genuine Latin word:
*mapva.

45. OE. gaffetung 'scoffing/ Germ. *gafwat- : ME. gabben 'lie,
scoff, jest, prate/ N.E. gab, gabble, ON. gabb 'mockery/ gabba
'mock, make game of/ MLG. gabben idem, MDu. gabben 'scoff,
laugh in derision, pre-Germ. *ghdpy- 'hiare':ON. *gafa 'hiare'
(pret. gaffii), OE. geaflas 'jaws/ Bulg. zSpam 'gahne/ Skt. haphikd
'Gahnen' (cf. Persson Beitr., 835). Cf. No. 49.

46. OHG. laffa 'palmula, extrema pars remi/ NHG. Swiss laff
'Lowenzahn/ Germ. *lafwd:La,t. lappa (*lapvd), Bulg. lopus ' Klette' :
OHG. lappo 'Ruderblatt' (No. 51), OE. Iceppa etc., No. 2.

GERM.

47. OE. ebba 'ebb, low tide/ ebbian 'ebb.' MLG. ebbe, OHG.
ippihhon 'zuruckrollen':Goth. ibuks 'sich riickwarts wendend';
ib 'ab-' (cf. Brugemann, Grdr.2, II, 1, 507), Gr. eiri, etc. The meaning
of Germ. *efji was perhaps influenced by *a5, since IE. *opl ( : *epi)
would fall together with *apo.

48. NE. fob 'a little pocket as a receptacle for a watch/ dial.
fub, fubs 'a plump, chubby young person/ fubby, fubsy 'plump,

26 FRANCIS A. WOOD

chubby,' NHG. Pruss. fuppe 'Tasche, die man an sich tragt/ sich
fuppen 'Fallen werfen, nicht glatt anschliessend stehen, von Kleid-
ern,' Germ. */u5w-:Ital. poppa 'Brustwarze/ Lat. *puppa, pupus
'boy, child/ pupa 'girl; doll, puppet,' Lett, pups ' Weiberbrust/
paupt 'schwellen.'

49. ON. gabb 'mockery,' gabba 'mock,' etc. (No. 45), *gd5w-:0ft.
gaffetung 'scoffing.'

50. Icel. kubbi, kubbr 'stump, stub,' Norw. dial, kubbe, kubb
'block, stub,' ON. kobbi 'Robbe,' Dan. kobbe idem, NE. cob 'a
roundish lump: nut, kernel or stone (of fruit), roundish loaf, ball
or pellet of food for fowls; haycock; ear of wheat, cob (of maize) ; a
young herring, bullhead, clam,' cobble 'a round stone,' cub 'whelp,'
LG. kobbe 'spider,' NE. cobweb 'spiderweb,' etc., Germ. *kufiw-:
OE. copp 'summit,' Icel. kufr 'rundlicher Gipfel,' etc. (No. 11), and
perhaps Lith. guba 'Schober/ Lett, guba 'Heuhaufen' (NE. cob
idem), gubt 'sich kriimmen, beugen,' etc. It is probable that the
Balto-Slav. bases gub-, gyb-, gub- (Berneker 1, 360, 366, 373) represent
IE. *gubh- and *ghubh-. Here probably also MHG., NHG. quappe
' eel-pout' : MHG. kobe idem. Or less likely quappe, Germ. *kwafiwo- :
Pruss. gabawo 'toad,' OBulg. zaba 'frog.'

51. Swed. labb 'Pfote,' OHG. lappo 'Ruderblatt,' lappa 'nieder-
hangendes Stuck Zeug, Lappen,' MHG. lappe 'einfaltiger Mensch/
LG. labbe 'Mund, Hangelippe/ NIcel. labba 'walk slowly, saunter/
*labw-:OLG. lappe 'Zipfel eines Kleides/ etc., No. 2.

52. EFris. libbe, libsk, libber(ig) 'widerlich, ekelhaft, schmierig,
klebrig/ libb-sb't 'unangenehm suss, schmierig und klebrig suss,
z. B. von Syrup, Honig, etc., from *fo'5w-:Lat. lippus 'blear-eyed/
Lith. lipus 'klebrig.'

53. OHG. ruppa, rupa 'Raupe/ NHG. dial, ruppe, roppe idem,
OHG. rupba 'Quabbe, Aalraupe' MHG. ruppe, rupe, E.Fris rubbe
'Robbe/ Norw. rubb 'rope-end, stub or fragment of anything/
rubba 'rub, scrub; scale fish/ EFris. rubben 'rub, scratch, scrape/
etc., Germ. *n/5w-:Lith. rupus 'nicht klein gemacht, grob (vom
Acker), uneben, rauh/ rupuzt 'Krote/ riipus 'besorgt/ ruple 'die
rauhe Borke an alten Baumen/ raupai 'Masern, Pocken, Aussatz/
Lat. rumpo, OE. reofan 'break, tear,' etc. Cf. No. 3.

54. MHG. rappe ' Raupe, eruca/ rappen ' abraupen/ rappe ( : rapfe
No. 4) 'Kratze, Raude/ Germ. *ra6w-:Pol. ropucha 'Krote/ Gr.

GERMANIC W-GEMINATION 27

'eat, feed on/ ON. rafr (strip) 'Raff,' refill 'strip,' EFris.,
Du. rafel 'raveling/ N.E ravel.

55. ON., Norw., Swed. skabb 'Kratze, scab/ OE. sceabb 'scab/
NE. shabby 'mean, scurvy; of mean appearance, seedy, unkempt/
MLG. schabbich 'raudig/ Germ. *skafiwa-, *sfca5w-:OE. scafoda,
'what is shaved or scraped off/ OLG. scavatho 'Raude/ probably
Germ. *skabu-pan-, Lith. skabus 'sharp'; skabu 'cut, hew/ OE.
scafan 'shave, scrape/ Goth, skaban 'shave/ Lat. scabo, scabies.

56. MLG. schubbe, schobbe 'Schuppe/ schobben 'die Schuppen
von einem Fische entfernen/ MDu. schobben, schubben 'scheuern,
schaben, kratzen/ EFris. schubben idem, schubbe 'Schuppe/ schubbig
'schuppig, schorfig, rauh/ Germ. *skubw-:ON. sky fa 'schieben,
stossen; abschneiden/ MLG. schove ' Fischschuppe/ schoven 'be-
schuppen, betriigen.'

GERM. -m-w-:HG. -mm-

57. OHG. frammert, frammort, framort 'vorwarts, ferner':
*framwert; *heimmort, heimort ' heimwarts ' : *heim-wert (Braune,
Ahd. Gr., §109, Anm. 4); MHG. giemolf 'den Rachen aufsperrender
Wolf from *giem-wolf (Lexer): OHG. giumo, goumo 'Gaumen/
ON. gymer 'Schlund, Meer.'

58. Like these are OHG. emmiz, emiz ' f ortwahrend/ emmizen
'immer/ emmizig, emizzig, emezlc, emazzig 'bestandig, f ortwahrend,
beharrlich' (NHG. emsig), emmizig en ' f ortwahrend, immer/ from
*amwiz, *an(t)-wiz ' recurring ': *-wiz 'going/ taga-wizzi (coming
daily) 'daily/ ar-wizzan 'go away/ Here n is first assimilated to m
before was in MLG., LG. man 'nur' from *nwan, OS. newan, OHG.
niwan(a) 'nichts als, nur'; MDu. mare, maer, Du. maar from MDu.
*nware, neware, newaer.

IE. -d#-:GERM. -tt-

59. Icel. patti 'kleines Kind/ Swed. dial, patte ' Weiberbrust,
Zitze/ NE. pat 'a lump, as of butter/ Germ. *patt-, pre-Germ.
*padu-:Skt. badvam 'Haufe, Trupp, ein best, grosse Zahl/ badarah
'zizyphus jujuba, Judendorn/ bddaram 'Brustbeere."

No doubt other examples of this change occur.

IE. -^-:GERM. -pp-

60. OHG. fethdhah, fettah 'Fittich/ Germ. %6wafca-:Lat. im-
petus, Gr. Trerojuat 'fly.' Compare the same ending in Gr. wrepv^

28 FRANCIS A. WOOD

'wing': Lat. pro-ptervos 'Tr/ooTrerifa'; OHG. fedarah ' wing ' :fedara
'feather/

61. OE. scceppa 'nail,' *skapwan-:sceapa 'nail/ scapel 'weaving-
implement/ probably *skapula- 'shaft, weaver's reed,' identical in
form with Goth, skapuls 'schadlich/ *skh9tulo- 'cutting, stripping/
sb. 'strip, Scheit.' Cf. Nos. 30, 76.

62. OS. kledthe, kleddo 'Klette/ OHG. chledda chletta, chleddo
chletto idem, Germ. *klipw-:Liih. glitus 'glatt, schllipfrig' (primarily
'sticky'), Gr. y\Lrrbvy\oibv Hes.; Lat. glis, -tis 'humus tenax/
glus, -tis, gluten, OE. cllpa 'poultice, plaster (for wound), cet-clipan
'adhere.' Similarly OE. elate 'burdock/ elite colt's-foot' belong to a
base *glid- 'stick, adhere ': Lett, glidet 'glatt, schleimig werden';
and OE. clife 'burdock/ OHG. kliba ' Klette ':OE. difian 'adhere/
Serb.-Cr. gllb 'Kot/ OBulg. u-gUbZti 'stecken bleiben.'

63. OE. wippe 'withe, bond; chaplet, crown/ cyne-wippe
'diadem/ OFris. withthe 'Bande, Fessel/ MLG. wedde (and wede)
'Strick, Strang, bes. von Weidenreisern/ Germ. *wipwan-:~La,t.
vitta 'band, fillet' (*vitva), Gr. trvs, Aeol. Flrvs 'the edge or rim of a
round body; the belly of a wheel; the rim of a shield; arch (of the
eyebrows); rib/ Ire'a 'willow/ Pruss. witwan idem. Notice that
Lat. vitta is from an early gemination from *vitva, while cappa
(No. 19) is a later assimilation from *catva, *catud.

64. OE. stoeppan 'stay, support/ stceppig 'sedate, serious/
Germ. *stapw-:O'El. stapol 'foundation, base; stability; firmament,
sky; position, place/ ON. stp&ua 'stop, check/ Lat. statuo, status,
Lith. status 'steil; unhoflich, derb, grob.' Cf. No. 21.

65. ME. laththe 'lath/ OHG. latta 'Latte/ Germ. *lapwo. Cf.
No. 22.

66. OE. moppe 'moth/ MHG. motte, mutte, Germ. *mupwan-:
*muttan, No. 24.

67. OE. smippe 'smithy/ OHG. smiththa, smidda, smitta (and
smida) 'Schmiede' may represent Germ. *smipwon- (and in part
*sra*/>j6n-:ON. smifiia ' smithy '): ON. smifir, gen. smifiar 'smith/
Germ. *smipu-.

FRANCIS A. WOOD
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

[To be continued]
92

STUDIES IN THE FORNALDARSQGUR NORDRLANDA

— Continued

II. THE HERVARAR SAGA

2. The bearing of version U upon the poetic portions. — The copyist
of a saga in his own language could, if so disposed, change in con-
siderable degree the wording of prose material without greatly
altering the essential content. He could for that matter even
alter the content. In the case of poetic material such possibilities
were, it is true, not absolutely excluded, but any alteration was
much more difficult. Furthermore in oral tradition poetic material
lends itself more easily to exact memorizing. The poetic portions
of such a saga as the Hervarar saga are accordingly in some respects
a more sensitive test of relationship than the prose portions. If
the conclusions I have already reached1 as to the mutual independ-
ence of the three versions ([/, jR, and H) are correct, the agreement
of any two upon a reading as against the third should establish
their majority reading as presumably that of the original common
source, while conversely the excellence of a text constructed upon
this principle would tend to confirm the idea of the mutual independ-
ence of the three versions. As showing that such are the facts of
the Hervarar saga and that through recognition of them the text
of the poetic parts is susceptible of decided improvement it is my
purpose to list the main contributions of U to the verses. For the
ready identification of the verses in question I shall first give the
number of page, stanza, and verse according to the text of Heusler
and Ranisch,2 as this is doubtless on the whole the most generally
accessible one and rests upon a careful comparison of the two versions
R and H. Other editions are concerned with the single versions
separately except the more recent one of Finnur J6nsson, who in-
cludes in his collection of scaldic poetry3 the verses of this saga.

i Modern Philology, XI (1914), 363 fl. 2 Eddica minora, 1903.

3 Den norsk-islandske Skjaldedigtning, II, A, 221 ff., 242 flf., 291 flf.; B, 240ff., 262flf.,
311 ff., 1914. The verses of the Hervarar saga are not of scaldic but of Eddie type, as
Heusler and Ranisch have rightly insisted. The text of Vigfusson and Powell in Corpus
poeticum boreale (1883) can hardly be used for our purpose.
93] 29 [MODBKN PHILOLOGY, June, 1920

30 A. liERoY ANDREWS

This editor bases his text upon all the accessible material, but in an
arbitrary rather than methodical way, and his " consideration " of
U is " limited" and confined to the very imperfect Verelius edition.
The reading first given will mostly be the original one as indicated by
the majority agreement of two out of the three manuscript versions
H, R, and U. The reading accepted by Heusler and Ranisch for
the Eddica minora will be indicated by E, that of Finnur Jonsson
in the Skjaldedigtning by S. The minority variants will follow the
original reading. The cases given will be limited to those in which
U by its agreement or approximate agreement with H or R definitely
establishes the original reading and all such cases will be included,
even where E and S have already chosen correctly. Minor points
of spelling or ending will be omitted; they point in the same direc-
tion as those of greater consequence. For our purposes normalized
spelling and the Sievers verse-types with the general principles of
bragarmdl will be taken for granted. For the first few stanzas
lacking in H, but occurring in the Qrvar-Odds saga (Q-0) the latter
will be used as the third member for checking instead of H.
56:8 E S (bracketed in S as not genuine); R U verses 1-4, 7-8;

Q-0 verses 1-6; H lacking.
63:4:1-3; 63:5:3-4; 62:2:5-8 Q-0 E; R U S combined in single

stanza in order indicated; H lacking.
62:2:7 fullhugar U E; R berserkir (belongs in next stanza); Q-0 S

fostbrcefir (metrically inadequate).
63:3 R U E S; H lacking (Q-0 has verses 1-2 hopelessly corrupt;

these are bracketed in E as not genuine).
63:3:3 skulu U Q-0 E; R S munu.
62 : 2 : 1-4 U Q-0 E S (bracketed in S as not genuine) ; H R lacking

(its substance resolved into prose in R). The wording differs

considerably in Q-0 and U and both are obviously corrupt.
63:5:6 orrostu heyja U Q-0 (so in most manuscripts of Q-0 and

accepted by Boer in his edition) ; E eiga orrostu (from a single

manuscript of Q-0); R S eiga nema se deigr.
63:5:8 nema U Q-0 E; R S eda.

52:1:4 miklar U Q-0; R E (for Hervarar saga version) S mar gar.
52:1:6 en d hliV U Q-0 E S; R ok en siVa (no alliteration).
52:3:1 dfoldu U Q-0 S; R E (in Hervarar saga version) atfullu.

STUDIES IN THE FORNALDARSOGUR NORDRLANDA 31

52:3:2 bu U Q-0 (some manuscripts of Q-0 have 6dZ); R E (in
Hervarar saga version) S tun.

52:3:4 Idfii U Q-0 (so the manuscripts of Q-0; not accepted by
Boer in his edition) ; R E S rdfti.

52 : 5 : 1-2 Leiddumk en hvita hilmis dottir U Q-0 S; R E (in Hervarar
saga version) Hvarfk frd hvitri hlads befigunni (reading of the
last verse uncertain and its meaning wholly problematical).

52-53:6-7 RES; U has these stanzas in the reverse order, 7-6,
which agrees with the relative order in Q-0 where 7 occurs as
4 and 6 as 9. The order of U seems to me to give better sense
than that of R.

52 : 6 : 7-8 ef hun sifian mik ser aldri U Q-0 (thus most of the manu-
scripts of Q-0; Boer follows the slightly different reading of
a single manuscript, er vit slfian seumsk aldrigi, and is followed
by E in its Q-0 version and by S); RE (in Hervarar saga
version) er ek eigi kem til Uppsala.

88:1:3 hefSi U; R hun. The common source was probably the
abbreviation h. The reading hun has caused editors to elim-
inate the t of fengit (U R) as a corrupt negative suffix; this is
also the procedure in E. With heffii, however, fengit is the
perfectly natural participle. 8 has here accepted the U read-
ing from Verelius.

88:2:2 (ef) litil era efni U. With the elimination of the ef this
gives a good verse and good sense and is followed by S (from
Verelius). R lacks the words following litil, is metrically in-
adequate and gives no sense. E alters to litlum and combines
with an alteration of the corruption of the first two words of
the next verse to af frettum.

88 : 2 : 3 froekn U (its form froekinn is the less common one and metri-
cally not so good) S (from Verelius). This reading was con-
jectured by Bugge (var frcekri) without reference to U (Norrfine
Skrifter, p. 312, 1873), though as an afterthought he suggested
fremstr (op. cit., p. 369) which is accepted in E (fremstr var).
R offrett (manifestly corrupt).

89 : 5 : 2 sem hraftast kunnir U; R hratast (corruption for hradast; cf .
positive adverbial form hratt, or according to Bugge possibly
to be read hvatast, which would be synonymous). There is,

32 A.« LEROY ANDREWS

however, no alliteration with the preceding verse Bu (pu) mik
at ollu (R). Bugge (op. cit., p. 313) had conjectured bazt for
hratast and is followed in both E and S (bezt in S). As a matter
of fact the corruption may well lie in the bu of the preceding
verse. In the manuscript u the space for this verb had been
left blank, some copyist perhaps not being able to make out
a form which the copyist of R had misread as bu. A later
hand had inserted in u, perhaps quite irresponsibly, ertu.

89:5:5 salt U E S; R fdtt (gives no alliteration).

13 : 1 : (1-4 footnote) H U S; R lacking, in E consigned to the foot-
notes as not genuine. The readings of H and U vary consici^*-
ably, but evidently preserve with corruptions the half-stanza
otherwise lacking.

13 : 1 : 5 einn H U E; R S lacking,

13:2:5 elligar R U; H E S hraffliga.

13:2:6 vit skiljum RU; H E S hedan Iffiir.

14:4 HUES; Slacking.

14 : 5-6 H U E S. R has the order 6-5.

14:6:6 litit hrcefia R; U litit saka (saka metrically objectionable
and manifestly a corruption) ; H rekka lidna. E and S follow
earlier editors in altering to liSna rekka.

14:6:7 rekka slika RU; H E S skjotla skelfa.

14:6:8 raftumsk fleira (vi$) R; U (ok) raftum fleira; H E S skulum
vi(S talask.

14:5 (footnote). The stanza of H relegated in E to the footnotes
as not genuine is confirmed as genuine by U and also included
in S. Its position in H is before stanza 5, but it was transposed
in Petersen's edition (Nordiske Oldskrifter, III [1847], 17) to the
position after stanza 6, which transposition has been generally
accepted by later editors including Finnur J6nsson. As a matter
of fact U has it in this correct position.

15:9:3 megir meingjarnir U; R megin meingjarnir; H S megir at
meinsamir; E megir meinsamir.

15:10:10 fela H U E; R S bera.

16 : 11 : 8 dauda menu RU; H E S menu dauda.

16 : 12 : 1 ni&r lacking R U S; HE

STUDIES IN THE FORNALDARSOGUR NORDRLANDA 33

16:13:1 Segir (pu) eigi salt meru; R Segir pu eigi salt; H Segftu
einn salt mer. U has here the right reading, its segir being con-
firmed by R, its eigi by R, its mer by H. S has the correct
reading without referring to U. E has Segftu eitt salt (eitt
suggested by Bugge, op. cit., p. 216). The original verse was
probably Segira salt mer.

16:13:5 Tyrfing med per H S; U Tyrfing me% ser (ser evidently a
corruption former) ; R Tyrfing (rest lacking) ; E Tyrfing hvassan.

16:13:6 trautt er (to be read trautt's) per at veita H U S; R trautir
ertu; E traudr ertu at veita.

"* "3:7-8 arf Angantys einga barni U (the manuscript u has einka
for einga) ; R arf at veita einga barni; H arfapinum einar boenir.
U is the only reading that gives good sense, and is confirmed by
R except the Angantys, where the other two agree neither with
it nor with each other. S refers to Verelius, but combines
arbitrarily eingabarni einar boenir. E has arfapinum einga barni.

17:17:3 hafa R U; H E Sbera.

17:17 -A magni R U S; H E afli.

17-18:18-19 HUES; R lacking. In these two stanzas U has
apparently in several places better readings than H, some of
which (from Verelius) have been accepted in S, while E keeps
the readings of H or alters them arbitrarily. However, as the
matter cannot be checked by agreement with a third manu-
script further discussion is omitted.

18:20:7-8. These two verses belong at the end of stanza 18, while
the two at the end of 18 belong here, as evidenced by the agree-
ment of H and U (accepted in S). E has altered on the basis
of R alone (and the note of Bugge, op. cit., p. 219), which has
the two belonging at the end of 18 attached at the end of 20,
with the rest of both stanzas lacking.

18:21:6 moldar hvergi HUES; R fyrir mold of an.

18:21:8 i hendr nema H E S; U i hendr (at) nema; R i hond bera.

18:22:2 ok i hond nema R U; H E S ok i hendr nema. The ma-
jority agreement of manuscripts stamping U as right in both
cases is here entirely in accord with the poetic effect, which is
apparently lost upon the editors of E and S. Angantyr doubts

34 A*. LEROY ANDREWS

that any maiden would dare take the sword in her hands.
Herv9r asserts her readiness to take it in one hand, answering
not only the expressed doubt as to her courage, but also any
possible implication as to her strength.

19:24:6 bufilungr H U E S; R bragningr.

19:25:3 fldrdd H U E; R S fullfeikn.

19:25:4 hvi (pu) fagna skalt R S; U pvi (pu) fagna skalt; H hverju
fagna skal; E hvi fagna skal.

19:25:5-8 RUES; H lacking (occurring already in an earlier
stanza, 17:16:5-8).

19:26:5 litt rcekik pat R U S; H Hit rotfiumz pat; E litt hrcedumk
pat (cf. Bugge, op. tit., p. 221).

19:26:6 vim R U; H E S nitir.

19:26:7 hvat R U; H E S hve.

19:27-29 H U; R lacking because of loss of one leaf of manuscript.
There is then here no possibility of checking by majority read-
ings and discussion is omitted except upon one point. Stanza
27 is followed in U by an extra stanza which is apparently
genuine. E makes no mention of this. S quotes it in the foot-
notes (from Verelius), but speaks of it as a doublet of 26. As
a matter of fact the first five verses are very nearly a repetition
of those of 22, the last two of those of 26. Repetition of this type
is, however, common enough in Old Norse poetry and not
lacking in this particular poem. It will be recalled that H had
previously omitted a half -stanza (25 : 5-8) because it represented
such a repetition (H was interested primarily in the riddle-
contest and abbreviated the rest of the saga) and such was
apparently the reason for the omission here. The stanza of
U would be spoken by Hervor and would preserve the alter-
nation of stanzas between the two speakers.

106:1:1 Hafa ml ek dag U; RES Hafa vildak (the manuscript
actually reads vildag); H Hafa ek pat vilda. As will be noted
R and U are nearest each other. I suspect that U has the most
nearly correct reading and that the verse should read Hafa
vilk i dag (cf. the i gcer of the following). Loss of the i led to the
understanding of dag as verb-suffix instead of an independent
word.

STUDIES IN THE FORNALDARSOGUR NORBRLANDA 35

106:1:2 pat i gcer hafdak U; R pat i goer hafda; H es ek hafdal
goer; E pat er hafdak i gcer (following Ettmuller, Altnordisches
Lesebuch, p. 35, 1861) ; Spats haffiak i gcer.

106:1:3 vittu hvat pat var RES; U vittu hvdrt pat verk (corrupt);
H konungr, gettu hvat pat var.

107:5 and following. The three versions differ from each other in
the number and order of the riddles. These variations call
for separate treatment and will not be discussed here. The
order followed is that of U, which involves an irregularity in
the sequence of pagination from E.

114:21-22. The verses of these two stanzas are combined differ-
ently in the three versions: U 22: 1-3+21 : 4-6; 21 : 1-3+22:4-6;
H 21:l-3+22:4-5+22a:6; 22:1-3+21:4-5+22:6; RES
21; 22. Apart from the question as to which riddle comes
first U appears to have the arrangement of verses correct, 1-5
confirmed by H, 6 as following 5 by R.

114:21:4 morgum hafa manni H U; RES morgum monnum (hafa
with next verse).

114:21:5 komit HUE; RS orVit.

115:22a RUES; H lacking except verse 6, which occurs in place
of 21:6.

109:8:5 a helvega R U S; HE heljar til (manuscript helju; cf.
Bugge, op. rit., p. 241).

118:31:3 sdttir allir saman R S; U alsdttir allir saman; H E ok eru
sextan saman.

116:25:6 ok fylgja (pvl) margir mjok R S; U ok fylgir margr (in-
complete and corrupt, but confirming R); H ok rennr sem hann
ma. E accepts Bugge's (op. cit., p. 254) improvement of H,
ok rennr, er renna md.

112:16:6 skjalli H U E S; R skildi.

112 : 16 : 6-7 R U E. H S have the reverse order 7-6.

117:29:2 osgrua R U S; H E osku grua. The latter does not give a
good metrical verse; the former does, though it presents lexi-
cographical difficulties.

108:5:2 li&r RUES; H ferr.

115:23:2 i brimserkjum U; R S i brimskerjum; H E brimserkjum i.

108:6:5 en vi$ H U E S; R ok.

36 A, LEROY ANDREWS

109:9:4 okyrrir H U E; R S okvikvir.

116:26:5 R U E S; H lacking.

116:26:6 sumum HUES; Rfirum.

116:26:7 Ufa R U E S; H lofda.

116:26:8 lik R U E S; H lif.

118:32:2 solbjorgum d; U selbjorgum d; H E S (Bugge, op. cit., p.

360) solbjorgum 1; R solbjorg of d (preposition of is poetic

equivalent of urn).
118:32:3 verfiung vaka HUES (vaka not clear in C7); R bad ek

vel Ufa.
110: 12:7 from lltir R S; U fram gengr; H E ferr hart.

The result of the comparison undertaken above is primarily a
confirmation of that previously arrived at, that the U version of the
Hervarar saga is independent of versions H and R. The natural
deduction from this fact is that it must be used in establishing a
critical text of the saga, and it can be seen from the above how far
short the two attempts at a critical text of the verse portions have
fallen from achieving adequately such a result. What is true of
the verse portions is of course true also of the rest of the saga, and
all previous discussions of its composition suffer from the failure to
recognize the value of U in checking what is original in all the versions
and what is later variant.

A. LEROY ANDREWS
CORNELL UNIVERSITY

100

HERMANN KIRCHNER'S SAPIENTIA SOLOMONIS

Hermann Kirchner, of Marburg, adapted for the stage the
Sapientia Solomonis of Sixt Birck in 1591 and in the same year falls,
according to the Preface, the beginning of the Coriolanus.1 As the
Sapientia Solomonis was performed in June of that year and as the
Preface to Coriolanus, dated Idibus Aug. 1599, says it was nearly
eight years ago that he began the work, it would seem that the
Sapientia Solomonis is the prior production.

The title-page2 shows the origin and history of the piece. Scherer
pointed out3 the fact that the interpolation of the comic scenes was
from Frischlin's Rebecca. Keller refers4 to the performance of a
modified version of Birck's Sapientia Solomonis in England before
Queen Elizabeth (at Oxford or Cambridge) in 1565 or 1566. As far
as I have been able to learn we do not know of any performance of
this play of Birck's in Germany up to the one of Kirchner's version
in Marburg in 1591. The existence of a printed copy of the play
before this adaptation by Kirchner was unknown to Goedeke. It
is well known now that it is included in the Dramata Sacra, Comoediae
atque tragoediae aliquot e Veteri Testamento desumptae (Basileae, 1547).

Kirchner's Preface gives some information about the history of
the adaptation. It opens with a general argument in favor of the
drama as a source of pleasure to the eyes, ears, and mind, as well as
a source of various kinds of profit. The school drama is not merely
a diversion but a prelude or preparation for the pulpit, the teacher's
desk, and the tribune in public life and in the courts; Cicero is said
to have received valuable aid, as an orator, from the friendship and
emulation of Roscius, the actor, and Demosthenes also received

1 For an account of Hermann Kirchner and his Coriolanus (1591) see Publications
of the Modern Language Astociation of America, XXXIII, 2 (June, 1918), 269-301.

2 Sapientia / Solomonis Dra / mate comicotragico / descripta olim / a Xysto Betuleio, /
recognita nunc, aucta et exornata, aspersis / Frischliniani Gastrodis nonnul / Us salibus. /
Extemporali opera, imo lusu succisivo, sub / festino actionis accinctu / Hermanni Kirchneri.f
Symbolon Solomonis: / Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas. / Marpurgi 1591. The copy
of the play in the Royal Library in Berlin is apparently the only one in existence.

» Alloemeine Deutsche Biographie, on Sixt Birck.
* Shakespeare Jahrbuch, XXXIV, 224.
101] 37 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, June, 1920

38 Jfc.coB N. BEAM

benefit from the stage. The Preface contains also the dedication of
the work to the rector, vice-chancellor, deans and professors of the
university.

It is interesting to note what changes Kirchner made in adapting
Birck's play to the performance in Marburg. The most of these
were in the way of correcting Latin that was faulty in grammatical
or metrical respects. In twenty-nine places such changes were
made. Other alterations involve small changes in ideas, as changes
in the prologue to make it conform more nearly to the norm of the
Latin school drama, in giving the source of the play, exhorting the
audience to keep silent and begging their favor for the piece ; or when
at the end of the Gastrodes scene Frischlin's line: Nam herus nos
expectat sub ostio becomes Nam venter non patitur moram; or when
the elephants which Birck had the Queen of Sheba bring with her
are dispensed with by Kirchner. Several small and unimportant
details are omitted for reasons which are not altogether clear: B. 43
( = Birck's play, p. 43), Meroe canit Solomonta; quicquid Candaces /
Dictamini patet, notique climata: / Et Aethiops, etc. = K. 61 ( = Kirch-
ner's adaptation, p. 61), Meroe canit Solomonta regem : praedicat / Et
Aethiops, etc.

Omissions, substitutions, and additions, by Kirchner, constitute
the most important changes in the play. The choruses of Birck's
play at the end of each act, usually in Sapphic stanzas and meters,
paraphrasing parts of certain chapters of the Proverbs, fall out and
in their places are put, in several instances, the comic scenes from
Frischlin's Rebecca, in which the clown Gastrodes appears. These
scenes are, however, further elaborated by independent additions
of Kirchner, along with the addition of one new scene, either original
or from a source not known to me. Thus after the Argumentum,
just before the first act, there is omitted Chorus, Ex Cap. / pro-
verbiorum VIII Sub perso / na Sapientiae / Ode tricolos tristrophos,
sicut ilia Prudentia, / per quinquennia iam decem. Also after Act IV,
scene 5, is omitted Chorus Ex Cap. Proverb. 9. eo genere quo est
Horatianum illud, Solvitur acris hyems, as well as at the end of Act V,
scene 5, Chorus, Ex nono cap. Proverb, ut illud Horatianum, Sic te
diva potens Cypri, and also at the end of Birck's play Kirchner omits
the sixty-eight lines of the Chorus Ex Psalmo LXXII. Quo veri

102

HERMANN KIRCHNER'S "SAPIENTIA SOLOMONIS" 39

Solomonis, Christi nimirum, sapientia et iustitia describitur; in quo
absolute felicis regni status, quasi typo, quodam depingitur versu
Choriambico.

At the end of Act I, which Birck closes with a Chorus, ex eodem
(8) Proverbiorum cap. versu Choriambico, Kirchner uses as scene 6
the scene between Gastrodes and Chamus in Act IV (scene 5) of
Frischlin's Rebecca. In place of Chamus he has Syba and, not finding
the scene in Frischlin long enough for his purpose, he prefaced it
with sixty-six original lines, a monologue by Gastrodes in which the
clown characterizes himself as a true parasite. By being so he has
arrived ad hanc adipem. The court of Solomon is little to his taste.
They worship there a new goddess,

Deamque nescio quam (Temperentiam
Vocant) adhibent suis, dum potant, poculis
Tarn modicis, ut vix primores labias
Nedum interiores fauces nedumque utrumque latus
Tingas: philosophis hanc libens relinquo sobriam
Mensam, vapores qui cerebro suo timent,
Aut delicatulis illis puellulis
Quae fieri curatura iunceae student,
Mei mei stomachi per Saciam hospites
Non sunt.

He sees Syba coming to find him. The latter announces that
Gastrodes is wanted by the soldiers at the banquet, which is just
about to begin, but he must take care not to be seen by the master
of the feast; otherwise he will be driven out. Then begins the scene
as in Frischlin.

At the end of Act II, we have in Birck, Chorus ex eodem (8)
Proverbiorum capite, versu Sapphico (Ilia ego prudens Sapientia, ecce) .
In place of it Kirchner gives as Act II, scene 6, a scene from Act IV,
scene 6, of the Rebecca, prefacing it, as previously, for the sake of
introduction and connection with the story, with twenty-five lines
of his own and stage directions. The same Marcolphus whom Birck
used later in this drama in the comic parts is also brought in here in
Kirchner's original scene — a comic encounter between Gastrodes,
the glutton and winebibber, and the bully Marcolphus, in which
the latter is dismissed with a blow on the ear. Then Sympota

103

40 JACOB N. BEAM

(Ismael in Frischlin) comes, between whom and Gastrodes (as in
Frischlin) there ensues a long conversation filled with incredible
stories and exaggerations.

Between scenes 1 and 2 of Act III of Birck's play there is inter-
polated by Kirchner a dialogue between Justitia and Prudentia, of
forty-three lines, which seems to be original with him r1
Jus. : Ego parentis dicor summi filia

Astraea, lances quae manibus, quae cuspidem

Sonti timendam tempero, quae regibus

Asto fidelis purpureis pedissequa,

Aulas tueor, domosque, et altas curias;

Per me tribunal, per me stat praetorium

Adsis, soror, mecum regi, Prudentia,
Et sensa regis iudicantis dirige.

Prud. : Adsum Dei cerebro prognata, maximum

Mortalium donum, a Deo expetenda Olympico,
Mei expetita regis voto Davididis
Donis quern supra mortale ingenium veho,
Deisque parem facio videri omnisciis

Kirchner puts this as scene 2, that is, between the announcement
by the Praeco that Solomon is going to sit in judgment (scene 1
in Birck), and the presentation of the case of the women (scene 2 in
Birck). Kirchner 's original scene is in the nature of a chorus and
is the only addition of his to the play which is not in the comic spirit.
He seems in general to have aimed to fill with comic scenes the places
he left vacant by dropping out the choruses of Birck and thus he
worked, as did Frischlin, in the spirit of the age which was soon to
witness, if it had not already done so, such mixtures of the serious
and the comic in dramas, in the productions of Kyd, Marlowe, and
Shakespeare, which the English comedians brought to Germany.
As the Rebecca contained only two scenes in which Gastrodes appears,
and as these two scenes were used in filling up the gaps of the first
two acts of the revised play, it was necessary to turn elsewhere for
the necessary humor. Marcolphus, formerly devil, had degenerated

i An adaptation of Birck's Sapientia Solomonis, played in 1565 or 1566 before Queen
Elizabeth of England, preserved in the British Museum, has the allegorical figures,
Justitia, Pax, and Sapientia, and in it, as in our play, the humorous element is amplified,
especially the part of the clown Marcolphus. See Boas, The University Drama in the
Tudor Age (1914), p. 21.

104

HERMANN KIRCHNER'S "SAPIENTIA SOLOMONIS" 41

in Birck's play to the role of clown or court jester, who with impunity
jests even with the king himself. Kirchner supplies, whether original
or borrowed I am unable to say, a scene in which he brings on the
stage the original Marcolphus, Moloch Satanas himself. Before
Birck's Act IV, scene 1, containing the story of Solomon's embassy
to Hiram, king of Tyre, to ask for skilled architects to help in building
the temple, is interpolated this new scene:

Cacodaemon indignatur et ringitur, quod in nulla aulae parte
haerere posit.

Moloch Satanus solus.

Opera hie mea f rigent : f rustra dudum hanc aulam circumcursito :
Frustra laboro, et sudo : f umos f rustra et ignes torqueo :
Operam omnem, et vigilias perdo meas; ....

He fears Solomon, yet he cannot explain to himself why he does so.
He will move all Acheron to accomplish the destruction of the temple
and he believes that at some time it will fall before his lightnings and
flames. Meanwhile he will endeavor to corrupt Solomon perfoeminas
malas. He retires in terror when he sees the priest Sadochus, of
the next scene, approach.

In addition to these scenes, added entire, Kirchner enlarged, by
interpolations, in several places the speeches of Birck's characters,
carefully putting on the margin in each case the words: Additamenta
Kirchneri. Thus (Act I, scene 1) five lines are added amplifying
the military glory of Solomon's ancestors; in the same scene seven-
teen lines are added in further glorification of his wisdom; in the
next scene twelve lines of Kirchner's are inserted to show that life
is ruled by Jehovah and not by the Parcae, Fate, or Necessitas.
Birck's trial scene, a favorite in his dramas, was not long enough
here to suit Kirchner's taste, and in the statements of the women
before the king he gives them each several more lines in which to
continue their abuse of each other. When the king decides in favor
of the rightful mother, Tecnophila, Kirchner adds a page to her
exultations and rejoicings, in which she tells us that although her
boy has no father it may not prove a hinderance to him as history
has recorded many instances of boys of mean birth who became
great; Thama's two sons became princes and Jephta was not injured

105

42 JACOB N. BEAM

by the obscurity of his father. The best recommendation is inner
virtue. After a lengthy conversation between Solomon and the
Queen of Sheba, in which there is a tiresome amount of flattery, by
the Queen, of the wonderful wisdom and riches of Solomon, Kirchner
in a few lines of his own again introduces Marcolphus, who compares
himself with the strangers:

Ex Aethnae credo hos venisse vaporario

Homines fuliginosos, o facies nigras!

Suam quis illis elocabit filiam ?

Meam profecto nolim; quam primum hos videram,

Speculum consului de mea pulchritudine :

Video niveum esse me prae illorum coloribus ;

Libet superbire, et reliquos prae me contemnere

This play was performed at least once and perhaps twice in
Marburg. In the Staatsarchiv in Marburg there is entered in the
Marburger Cdmerei Rechnung the following item:

1591

Uff gewohnliche Ehrenmahl und Gastunge geistlicher und
weltlicher Herren und Rahten.

iiii th. iii Sch. iii d. sind 3 Gulden 10 albus 6 Heller sind nach
gehaltener Comoedi Salomonis den 14 Junii an Essenspeiz
uffgangen, als der Cammerrathe etzlich neben ihren weibern
bei Biirgemeister und Rath plieben.

Though this has no mention of the fact that the performance was a
university function it does not on the other hand expressly state that
it was a performance in the market place, as the following entry-
shows :

1598

Ausgabe verehrung an Gelt.

13 th. sind 10 Gulden dennen Burgern verehret, welche des
Absolonis Tragoediam uffm Marck gespielet den 12 Octobris
laut quittung 43,

in which case it was a performance in German, or particularly for
the Kammerdte or Burgermeister and Rat. The occasion for feasting
might easily have been in connection with a university drama to

106

HERMANN KIRCHNER'S "SAPIENTIA SOLOMONIS" 43

which the city officials were invited. Another entry is of interest

here:

Rechnung des Marburger Universitats Oeconomus.

1591

Gemeine Ausgabe

14 Gulden So Mag. Dns. Rector und Professores denen
Magistris und Studiosis pro honorario decretirt welche eine
Comoediam allhier agirt, und der loblichen Universitet
dedicirt, Inhalt Befelchs hierbey, den 14 Augusti.

This probably refers to the same performance of the Sapientia
Solomonis as the entry in the Cdmerei Rechnung, or, possibly, to
another performance of the same play. The date given here is
merely that of payment of the bill and not of giving of the drama.
Kirchner's adaptation, as we saw in the Preface, was dedicated to
the university, that is, to the officers and professors of the institution.

It might be possible to conclude that the Latin performance of
the play was held before the university authorities and that a German
version of the same play, or the play of Joh. Baumgart, Juditium,
Das gericht Salomonis (1561), or the similarly named drama of Hans
Sachs, was performed later in the Rathaus or in the market place;
or, the order of the performances in point of time may have been
reversed. We know that it was usual to give several performances
of plays in some such manner. Thus Baumgart, in the Prologue to
the play we have just mentioned, tells of three kinds of performances:
a "latein Aktion auf herrenmess" before the school authorities, a
German one before the council in the Rathaus, and finally one for the
people in the open, generally in the market place.1

In view of the fact that the only performance recorded of Birck's
Sapientia Solomonis was that in England in 1565 or 1566, the ques-
tion arises as to what may have induced Kirchner and his friends
to select this drama for adaptation. It may have been because of
the English performance before Queen Elizabeth that the drama
commended itself to the court at Hessen, then especially friendly
to England. This does not seem at all improbable when we learn
that the Latin and popular drama of England was calling forth, it
would seem, several imitations in Hessen just about this time. The

i Zellwecker, Prolog und Epilog im deutachen Drama (1906), p. 63; P. Exp. Schmidt,
Buhnenverhaltniaae dea deutachen Schuldramaa (1903), p. 45.

107

44 (JACOB N. BEAM

play, preserved in manuscript in Cassel, which Johannes Rhenanus
wrote and dedicated to Landgrave Maurice in 1613, on the strife
between the tongue and the five senses,1 is a literal translation of the
English play Lingua? ascribed to Anthony Brewer. The Gram-
matical of Isaac Gilhausen, to which in all likelihood the following
entry in the Rechnung des Marburger Universitdts Oeconomus refers,

1600
Gemeine Ausgabe.

6 Gulden 4 albus an RWFrn damit M. Gilhauszen als er eine
Comoediam ufm Schloss gehalten inhalt Befelchs verehret den
2 Aprilis,

was written without any reference to the Priscianus Vapulans (1571)
of Frischlin and, though for the most part an independent dramatiza-
tion of Guarna's Grammaticae opus novum (1511), it is to be referred
for comparison with the Latin comedy Bellum Grammatical, which
was represented on the stage in Christ Church College in Oxford
before Queen Elizabeth on September 24, 1592, the author of which
was the theologian Leonard Hutten. Bolte in his book on Guarna
and the Bellum Grammaticale does not seem, however, to have investi-
gated the relation of Gilhausen's work to the Latin comedy and no
answer is given to Scherer's suggestion4 that such a relationship may
exist. Another possibility is that of the play of Absolom. As far
as I can find out there existed no play of this title in Germany before
that of the Magdeburger, Heinrich Roeteler,5 of the year 1603. It
is quite possible that the play of that name, which we have seen was
mentioned in the Marburger Camerei Rechnung, is an adaptation or
translation of the Absolom referred to by Keller* as originating in
England in Elizabeth's time.

JACOB N. BEAM
PRINCETON, N.J.

1 Speculum Aestheticum, d. t. eine schdne und lustige Comoedia darin alle Sentu*, so
wohl innerliche als ausserliche, sambt ihren eygenschaften und Instrumentum ercldret und
gleichsam in einem Spiegel nor augen gestellt werden, neben einem lustigen Streitte, da die
Zunge der sechste sensus zu seyn, mitt der funff sensibus contendiret.

* Lingua, or, the Combat of the tongue and the five senses for Superiority: a pleatant
Comoedie, etc., 1607.

*Grammatica. Das ist: Eine lustige, und fur die Angehende Jugendt nutzliche
Comoedia, von den schlussel oiler Kunsten, nemblich der Grammatica und jhren Theilen.
Durch Isaac Gilhausium Marpurgensem (Franckf. a.M., 1597).

4 Allgem. Deutsche Biographic.

6 Goedeke, II, 153, No. 394.

6 Shakespeare Jahrbuch, XXXIV, 229.

108

PROFESSOR PROKOSCH ON THE IE. SONANT ASPIRATES

In Modern Philology (Vols. XV-XVI) we have an excellent
resume* of the problem of the sonant aspirates down to Ascoli's
solution. For Ascoli's bh, etc., Professor Prokosch sets up voiceless
spirants/, etc. (generally designated by the Greek aspirates 0, etc.).

Gondi-Burmese. — Sonant aspirates do not conform to any
European habits of articulation,1 and the type of articulation is
rare. Outside of Sanskrit (including modern Indie vernaculars)
sonant spirants are found only in non-Aryan Himalayan races, in
Gondi, and in Burmese, all being tongues contiguous with Sanskrit.
These neighbors may have infected Sanskrit with their articulation.
This is our author's preferred explanation, though he stoutly insists
that Sk. bh may have arisen by spontaneous phonetic process from
IE. / >pre-Indo-Iranian /3 (sonant spirant, and so throughout this
paper) >Sk. bh.2 Readers not skilled in phonetics will be sure to
follow our author in his personal preference for a Gondi articulation
of the Sanskrit sonant aspirates. Now the Gondi are a Dravida
stock (Turanian-Dravida, according to our author), and the Dravida
tongues have no [certainly original] sonant aspirates.3 So we have
the suggestion of intercourse between Gondi and Burmese.

Here I cannot go with Professor Prokosch at all. Gondi speech
is full of infections from Sanskrit or the Indie vernaculars. The
oldest Burmese literature is a Buddhistic Pali literature and I feel
bound to conclude that the Gondi and Burmese (and Himalayan)
sonant aspirates are an infection from Sanskrit, Pali, etc., and that

1 Europeans cannot now, without great effort, make flre with a drill, but once they
must have done so as easily as any contemporary savage folk.

2 In explaining the progression from 0 to bh — which fits nowhere into the progres-
sive schemata in his § 14 — the author partly follows Meringer in supposing a change
from 0 to 60 by way of affrication, and thus expresses himself: "in this case the cres-
cendo of the sound (' stopping ' in the resonance-chamber) must first have affected only
the beginning of the sound, while its off-glide must have been enunciated with mouth
opened more and more, instead of with the narrowing characteristic of the spirants.
This implies an older period of increased muscular intensity and a later of relaxed inten-
sity in Sanskrit. Such a reconstitution of the physiological conditions is admissible,
but susceptible neither of proof nor refutation. As it does not fit into a larger scheme
the propriety of the reconstitution is not to be established."

» When the lingual articulation of Sanskrit is charged to the Dravida stock there
is room for doubt. The older stratum of linguals arose by Fortunatov's law in reduc-
tions of IE. It, etc., to t, etc. There are also d's and dh's of palatal provenience.

109] 45 [MoDBBN PHILOLOGY, June, 1920

46 EDWIN W. FAY

it was not the other way about; see Encyc., Brit. IV, 480, and Wacker-
nagel, Ai. Gram., I, p. xxxvii. It is then for our author to make it
seem probable that Sk. bh systematically developed out of his /
rather than that bh was inherited from Indo-European. It is also
to be noted here that, in order to relieve the systematic difficulty
in proceeding from IE. /to Greek ph (<£), Professor Prokosch sought,
without finding, evidence for precursors of the Greek invaders who
did not have the power, or at least lacked the habit, of articulating
the surd spirants (/, etc.).

Because, I suppose, of the beautifully consistent tables that may
be constructed for the Germanic sound shiftings Professor Prokosch,
as will appear from the last footnote, is full of the desire to find con-
sistent physiological progressions suited to the " genius" (as it used
to be called) of the several tongues, and for this view he can — and
does — particularly plead French warrant. He therefore presents,
disavowing all claim of innovation, a scheme of phonetic change as
due (1) to crescendo or diminuendo of the exspiration; (2) to mus-
cular tightening or relaxation in the organs of speech (let us say to
taut and loose articulation).

Against the doctrine of uniformity (uniform direction, con-
sistency) of sound change in a language I lack phonetic skill to
argue at large, but it may be worth while to recall a few instances
where uniformity fails. Of the Germanic surd spirants th (6jb)
f ch (x) the last became h (the aspirate) in English, and to adult
English lips ich (or ach) is pronounceable only after severe practice,
while th and / remain easy. In German (I speak now of the articu-
lation only), th is unpronounceable but / and ch are quite vocable.
In Latin, in initial position, only / (</ and th) remains, while ch
has become the aspirate (h)} in the interior (I speak here of inter-
vocalic position only), / and^> (th) became b and d, but h remained
intact. In Sanskrit, in all free positions, IE. glh (and g*h before
IE. e) becomes the aspirate (h),1 and we also have the variants dh/h

i Herein our author sees proof of his contention for IE. (sonant spirant) y whence,
with loss of sonancy (voice), h. My own practice in learning to articulate German ich,
ach makes me quite realize the possibility of y>h — with scant change in articulation,
chiefly relaxation of the glottis— but, unlike the Greek, true Sk. y (i) never yielded h ;
why, then, the harder construct y<g^h ? However.^if we give full value to the author's
doctrine that Sk. *jh «g*h) must have yielded [dj], we may perhaps find therein a
reason for dh<dj(h) +t. Or does dh exhibit a lisping of Indo-Iranian \ t Of. OPers.
d(8) as a variant of x.

110

PROFESSOR PROKOSCH ON SONANT ASPIRATES 47

(see Wackernagel Ai. Gram., I, §217a) and bh/h, though dh, bh, gh,
are normal and thoroughly alive.1 Again, in Sanskrit the assibila-
tion of IE. kl>g (£) was completed and remained intact, but we
have g>j. In Old Irish we have kw > c, gwh > g, but gw > b. Dis-
regarding in part the intermediate stages, in Armenian, as in Ger-
man (first sound shifting), IE. bh shifts to b and 6 to p; but IE. p
shifts (through ph, the aspirate) to Germ. /, while in Armenian
p>ph yielded h,2 though pre- Armenian th and kh remained intact.
Surely this is evidence enough of unequal treatment of consonants
of the same rows and columns (I refer to the tabular arrangements
of the consonants).

And now to tabulate the results of Professor Prokosch's treat-
ment, limiting myself to bh (his/).

Sanskrit. — IE. f(<f>)>(3>bh (bh is a sonant aspirate, possibly a
Burmese articulation).

Greek. — IE. f>ph (surd aspirate), written <f> in Greek. (In
German borrowings Lithuanian writes p for German /; Slavic
writes b. The pre-Greek population may have lacked the surd
spirants.)

Latin. — IE. / remains / (interior 6).

The other tongues. — IE. /> 0 > b. (This change is due to increased
muscular tension. The stage £ assumed on account of necessary [ ?]
assimilation processes. But/>6 is admissible, supposing very weak
expiration with normal tension of the speech organs [articulation]
and coincident " stopping" in the glottis and resonance chamber.)

As I understand Ascoli's theory we have:

Sanskrit. — IE. bh>bh. (Here I raise the question whether h, i.e.,
the aspiration, was voiced [H]. The assumption of H may perhaps
make easier Bartholomae's law whereby IE. bdh [ fH] is the product
of bht. Or was IE. bh a whispered sound [see below] ?)

Greek. — IE. bh>ph (written <f>) >late Greek/. (Here the only
early change, shared by pre-Italic, is loss of voice.)

Latin. — IE. bh>*ph>f (interior b in free position). (That
Italic reached / a thousand years earlier than Greek offers not the

1 Why is not the partially affected change of dh> h a move in the same direction as
the change of jhtohf

2 Sometimes for h we find y, which Meillet regards as a precursor to h, but the
introduction of voice (?) in y and its subsequent elimination in A is not clear to me.

Ill

48 EDWIN W. FAY

least reason why both tongues did not reach the ph stage by the
same vocal route. To state one difference between these tongues,
Greek was a language of even stress [musical accent], Latin of com-
paratively violent stress [cf. hospes reduced from hosti-potis], and
the written word, literature, had a great stabilizing influence — all
that we know of the old languages is the written word — and Greek
had literature long before Latin.)

The other tongues. — IE. bh (?>/3)>6. (If ph>f is a most nor-
mal direction of change due to increase in the force of expiration,
bh [which is but ph+ voice, produced by tensing the vocal chords]
should by the same token yield /3 [whence 6].)

As Professor Prokosch found it convenient to assume that his
IE. / tended dialectally to /3 it might likewise be assumed for Ascoli's
sonant aspirate bh that there was a variation between H (voiced
aspiration) and h (unvoiced aspiration). Then we should have
Sk. bh<bH = H, Greek ph(<j>)<bh, Italic *ph(>f)<bh. For the
other tongues I do not know whether bH or bh might offer the easier
point of departure. Again, IE. bh may have had a " whispered"
articulation (or variant). By way of illustration I take the dialects
of middle Germany, whose people on going north are supposed to
say pirne (like South Germans), but on going south say birne (like
North Germans). From such a whispered bh may have come Sk.
bh, but Greek (and pre-Italic) ph.

Bartholomae's law. — I find the new doctrine of IE. / instead of
bh hard to reconcile with Bartholomae's law. Taking now for our
example the dentals, dh-\-t yielded (a) IE. ddh. But often there
was an inhibition of the law so that dh+t yielded (6) IE. it. As a
matter of fact, only the Indo-Iranian tongues fully exhibit the
operation of the rule (a) ; its inhibition (b) is attested most clearly
in contrast formations in Indo-Iranian, and at large in the other
tongues. The inhibition of the law was due to resuffixation, as to
which it is enough to refer to Bartholomae in Gr. Iran. Phil, I,
§§52, 3; 53. ii. In brief, the past passive participle suffix to was so
full of, or so filled with, semantic significance that the ddho par-
ticiples were remade as d-to>tto participles. This latter type of
participle and ti derivative (Greek Trfoms: Av. advb. apaiti-busti X
Sk. buddhi; in Greek TT for $ as in TTCVO-OAICU) alone survives as a

112

PROFESSOR PROKOSCH ON SONANT ASPIRATES 49

formal category outside of Indo-Iranian. In Latin, however, a kind
fate has left one absolutely unimpeachable example attesting the
treatment of IE. ddh in interior position, viz., credo: Sk. grad-
d[h]adhdti. To this example Solmsen called attention in IF. Anz., 19.
30, where he was expressly debating the words custos, aestas, hastaf the
very words to which Professor Prokosch appeals as exhibiting in
their st the Latin sounds that should correspond to Sk. ddh (<IE.
dh+t).

Nothing is more hazardous than to infer phonetic laws from
morphological reconstructions; and nothing justifies us in attach-
ing the abstract suffix tdt(i) directly to the root of Lat. aedes; whether
we write aidh-tat(i) or ai6-tat(i) we shall be but making an unsup-
ported reconstruction, not entitled for one moment to rank with
the realty of credo and Olr. cretim (on t<ddh see Pedersen, Kelt.
Gram., §§69, 51). For aestas and hasta Solmsen has shown a better
way and has referred to the number of equally possible (and equally
uncertain) explanations of custos.1 At all events credo definitely
eliminates Lat. st as the product of dh+t.

Grassmann's law. — In Greek riflrj/u (and in Sk. dddhati), by
Professor Prokosch's own admission, the actual difference between
T and 6 (d and dh) lies in the loss of the aspiration; cf. (but with
6 for p) bitha from phitha in Nyamwezi (see Meinhof , Introd. African
Lang., p. 67). In plain language, if Ascoli's reconstructions are
correct, when successive aspirates were to be uttered in successive
syllables each of these tongues lost the "puff" of its first aspirate,
its overcharge of breath — by way of economy, to save the puff for
the next. This seems a perfectly normal disposition of effort. It
is much more complicated when Professor Prokosch explains the
Greek change of rh(<p) rh to T 6( = th) as due to increased tension

1 Gothic huzds (hoard) — but see Palk-Torp, Norw.-Dan. Etymol. Wbch., s.v. "hose"
— may genuinely represent IE. kuddhos (hidden) and so, as an isolated word, fall under
Bartholomae's law (a). Also Lat. nodus (knot) may be identical in its phonology
(vocalism and gender as in <£6/»ros) with Sk. naddha (bound). The actuality of dh in
the root nedh has been unduly questioned. It is attested beyond all doubt in vMo*
(bastard) ; cf . for the semantics Sk. bandhula (bastard) ; also, with us suffix, Sk. ndhus
(neighbor) and dat. plur. nadbhyds (see Grassmann and the Petersburg lexica). In
Sanskrit the alternation dh/h is far too common to be challenged in naddhd-.ndhyati;
cf. particularly nom. upandt, ace. upandham (scandal). The correlation (rhyme) of
Lat. necto with plecto, flecto leaves it remote from Sk. ndhyati. As for the root stage
ned, I ascribe its de-aspiration to reduction forms nd(h), as in Greek &SUr) Lith. nSndri:
Olr. nenaid (nettle).

113

50 ,EDWIN W. FAY

in initial position conditioned of course on dissimilation (italics mine).
Similarly for Sk. d[h] dh.

Final summary. — The differences between Ascoli (as I under-
stand him) and Professor Prokosch may be tabulated as follows.
For the purpose of brevity the articulation of the aspirates (their
aspiration) will be designated by the word "puff," of the spirants
by the word "hiss."

Ascoli.— In Sanskrit, bh>bh (no change): Greek, bh>ph (loss
of voice); Italic, bh(>ph [loss of voice]) >/ (puff > hiss); other
tongues, (1) bh >b (loss of puff) or (2) bh>@ (puff > hiss) >b (loss
of hiss).

Prokosch.— In Sanskrit, />j8 (gain of -voice) >bh (hiss > puff;
possible intruding [Gondi-Burmese] articulation invoked); Greek,
/>?r (loss of hiss) >ph (</>) (gain of puff; possible intruding non-
Greek articulation invoked) ; Italic, />/ (no change) ; other tongues,
/>/3 (gain of voice) >6 (loss of hiss). Proof of intruding non-Indo-
European articulation would twice be welcomed.

In another form we may represent the changes thus :

Ascoli

bh>ph son. aspirate > surd aspirate loss of voice 2

bh > b aspiration lost loss of puff 1/0

?/3>6 son. spirant > sonant stop loss of hiss 0/1

ph>f surd aspirate > surd spirant puff > hiss 1

bh >|8 son. aspirate>son. spirant puff > hiss 0/1

Prokosch

/>j8 surd spirant > son. spirant gain of voice 2

p>ph surd > surd aspirate gain of puff 1

j8>6A son. spirant>son. aspirate hiss > puff 1

f>p surd spirant > surd stop loss of hiss 1

j3>6 son. spirant > sonant stop loss of hiss 1

Professor Prokosch has skill to show, none more, by what articu-
latory and expiratory movements putative / (etc.) could be con-
verted into bh irh; and his desire to transpose backward into Indo-
European the German phonetic habit, so to speak, is keen. But his
arguments to prove for Indo-European spirantic, rather than
aspirate, articulation are entirely inadequate to that end.

The writer does not claim — he would be the first to disavow
for himself — skill in physiological phonetics. Perhaps that is why

114

PROFESSOR PROKOSCH ON SONANT ASPIRATES 51

he cannot realize, either in the original paper or in the accompany-
ing rejoinder of Professor Prokosch, how the new theory achieves a
gain over Ascoli's, even as regards phonetic streams of tendency
(systematic phonetics). If the IE. phonetic system had no aspirates
their introduction into Sanskrit and Greek implies in fact a cross-
current in the original system. On the other hand, the passage of
aspirates into spirants is phonetically simple and well attested in
many tongues (cf. outlying examples in Meinhof, p. 61). The
writer, for reasons of personal regard toward Professor Prokosch,
could not have felt sarcastic intention toward him nor toward his
scientific work; and he pleads not guilty to any form of speech in
the least sarcastic.

EDWIN W. FAY
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS

REPLY1

I am indeed thankful to Professor Fay for his detailed considera-
tion of my article. That a scholar of his remarkable keenness,
although dissenting from me, is so utterly unable to advance any valid
arguments against my theory, is nearly as reassuring to me as its
acceptance by others: Collitz (AJPh., XXXIX, 415: ''Professor
Prokosch in my opinion is right in holding that the alleged voiced
aspirates were originally, in all probability, unvoiced spirants"),
Tuttle (see below), Lotspeich (JEGPh., XVII, 168: a tentative
approval of an earlier statement of my view in the Introduction to
Sounds and History of the German Language, written in 1915).

Professor Fay seems to base his opposition on these cardinal
points: (1) my suggestion of native Indian origin of Sc. bh, dh, gh;
(2) my reference to the chronological contrast between the Latin
and Greek developments; (3) my apparent neglect of irregular
developments of certain sounds; (4) Bartholomae's and Grass-
mann's laws; (5) most of all, though by implication, the general
principles of my method.

i This reply was submitted by Professor Fay over one year ago as part of his own
article which appears in this number of Modern Philology. Professor Prokosch intended
in view of the death of Professor Pay to withdraw his reply. It seemed best, however, in
view of Professor Fay's view of the matter, to allow it to appear as originally planned.

S. W. C.
115

52 'EDWIN W. FAY

(1) Whether Sc. bh, dh, gh were of Dravida or Burmese origin
or not is not essential for my theory; I thought I had stated this
clearly enough in my article. Nevertheless, it was truly "welcome"
(even though Professor Fay speaks somewhat sarcastically of my
" welcoming" such things) when I received the following letter from
Mr. Edwin H. Tuttle (North Haven, Conn.) :

I am sorry to find that you describe these sounds as being unknown in
native Dravidian words. Evidently you lacked access to the more recent
sources and trusted earlier writers who (like Caldwell himself) were not
overstrong in phonology and who failed to distinguish clearly between
modern Tamil and ancient Dravidian. Kanara and Telugu have native
words with voiced aspirates. From Kanara ombhattu (10—1 = 9), Telugu
padi (10) beside padhnalugu (14), ebhhai (50) and early Tamil pahtu, a
variant of padu> *phato (10), it appears that Dravidian possessed voiceless
and voiced aspirates some two or three thousand years ago. Admitting
that the reverted linguals of Sanscrit came from Dravidian we can safely
say that the voiced aspirates may have had the same origin.

(2) The retarding influence of the literary language on the pro-
nunciation of Greek <£, 6, x is no convincing argument, for this
influence makes itself felt chiefly in regard to the form of words
and phrases, but has nothing to do with sound changes that are not
indicated by the spelling; the symbols </>, 6, x continued to be used,
but their phonetic values changed, since nothing in these letters
suggests any given pronunciation.

(3) The majority of the cases of apparently irregular phonetic
development cited by Professor Fay I have explained on former
occasions, especially in JEGPh., XVI, 1 ff., and in Sounds and
History of the German Language. Therefore (in order to save space)
I may be permitted to restrict myself this time to the stubbornly
dogmatic statement : There is nothing irregular in any of the instances
quoted; all of them are perfectly in keeping with the requirements of
their particular organs of speech and with the phonetic tendencies of
their languages.

(4) Grassmann's law is not Indo-European, but took place inde-
pendently in Greek and Sanscrit (Indo-Iranian). It throws no
light whatsoever on the subject as far as early IE is concerned.
Nor is Bartholomae's law IE, and I can, therefore, not accept Pro-
fessor Fay's construction of IE. *kuddhos (Goth, huzds). I cling to

116

PROFESSOK PROKOSCH ON SONANT ASPIRATES 53

IE *kud-to- (or, if preferred, *kudh~) and cannot detect anything
improbable in the assumption that this became Lat. custos, while
IE *kred-6o (*kred-dho) became credo.

(5) These are details about which Professor Fay and I could
easily come to an agreement, I am sure. But there is a more funda-
mental difference between him and myself concerning the very
principles of linguistic method, and that is the fact that I am, in
scientific matters, an incorrigible optimist, while Professor Fay
looks with skeptical pessimism at an effort like mine which "sucht
den ruhenden Punkt in der Erscheinungen Flucht." I have stated
my philological platform so often that, instead of a restatement, I
prefer to quote this time from two scholars who have expressed the
same views more clearly and forcibly than I am able to do:

Welchen Sinn haben alle die Tausende von Lautgesetzen, solange sie
isoliert bleiben, solange sie nicht in hohere Ordnungen aufgelost werden?
. . . . Im Einzelnen miissen wir das Allgemeine finden lernen, und dem-
nach ist auch die Erkenntnis einer Tatsache, welche das ganze Sprachleben
beherrscht, von grosserer Wichtigkeit als die Erkenntnis irgendwelcher
Erscheinungsformen (Schuchardt, Uber die Lautgesetze, S. 36).

Une loi phone"tique ne peut done £tre reconnue valable que si elle est
d'accord avec les principes qui rSgissent le systeme articulatoire de la langue
au moment ou elle agit. ... Tout changement phone" tique peut 6tre consid^re"
comme du a Faction de forces intimes et secretes, auxquelles convient assez
bien le nom de tendances. Ce sont ces tendances qui modifient sans cesse
la structure du language, et Involution de chaque idiome re*sulte en derni&re
analyse d'un jeu perpe"tuel de tendances. ... La notion de tendance phon6-
tique est plus exacte theor^tiquement, et pratiquement plus f^conde que
celle de loi phon6tique. Elle seule permet de determiner avec precision la
cause des changements phon^tiques et d'interpreter scientifiquement ceux
memes qui paraissent le plus rebelles a toute discipline scientifique (Vendryes,
Mel ling., p. 116).

EDUARD PROKOSCH

BBYN MAWR COLLEGE
BRYN MAWB, PA.

117

CALVIN THOMAS, 1854-1919

The death of Professor Calvin Thomas, of the department of
Germanic Languages and Literatures in Columbia University,
means the loss of one of the ablest scholars and teachers in the
field of Germanics in this country. Born near Lapeer, Michigan,
he acquired the elements of his early education in the common
schools of his native state. His craving for knowledge and for an
adequate preparation for successful work as a teacher led him to
enter the Michigan State University, an organic part of the edu-
cational system of Michigan. Upon his graduation from that
institution at the age of twenty, in 1874, he began a three-year
engagement as teacher of Latin and Greek in the Grand Rapids
high school. This work he relinquished for a year of philological
study at the University of Leipzig. He was appointed in 1877 to
an instructorship in German in his Alma Mater, a position which
in the year 1886 became a full professorship. Here he organized
and directed with marked success a department of Germanic Lan-
guages and Literatures. Few teachers ever commanded the
admiration, love, and enthusiastic devotion of successive classes of
students that were accorded Professor Thomas here and in his
subsequent work.

In 1896 he accepted a call to Columbia University as professor
of Germanic Languages and Literatures, a position in which he
continued to work effectively along lines already indicated by his
activity in Michigan. Through the preparation of annotated edi-
tions of earlier and later German classics, including in 1892 the
first part and in 1897 the second part of Goethe's Faust, through a
standard systematic German Grammar in 1895, through his Life and
Works of Schiller in 1901 and his Goethe in 1917, through a useful
Anthology of German Literature in 1909, as well as through a brief
History of German Literature in the same year, Professor Thomas
has substantially increased and enriched the available means for
studying the German language and literature in American schools
and colleges.

119] 55 [MODEBN PHILOLOGY, June, 1920

56 STARJI WILLARD CUTTING

The Committee of Twelve appointed in the year 1897 by the
National Educational Association to prepare a report on college
entrance requirements was, in the absence of satisfactory national
standards of work in modern languages, assigned a task of real dif-
ficulty and of great importance. Whatever improvement in the
teaching of modern languages in this country may fairly be ascribed
to the report of this committee, published in 1899 and widely dis-
cussed in subsequent years, is due in large measure to the energy,
insight, and tact of the chairman of the committee, Professor Thomas.

His interest in a gradual simplification of English orthography
led him to identify himself closely with the spelling-reform move-
ment in this country and to undertake studies reflected in twenty-
six articles on the letters of the alphabet in the New Standard
Dictionary, 1913.

Professor Thomas had been since the founding of Modern Phi-
lology in 1903 a member of its Advisory Board of Editors. Our
journal has, therefore, an especial sense of loss in his death.

STARR WILLARD CUTTING

120

Modern Philology

VOLUME XVIII Jufy IQ2O NUMBER 3

LA CALPRENfiDE DRAMATIST

It is my purpose in this article, not to stress the importance
of a neglected author, but to give the results of an inquiry into the
work of one who as a dramatist has hitherto roused the curiosity of
several writers, but attracted the study of very few. M. Lanson
has discussed some of his plays briefly in his Esquisse d'une histoire
de la tragedie frangaise.1 Both he and M. Bernardin have criticized
at some length his Mort de Mithridate.2 But most critics have con-
fined themselves to pointing out the novelty of his subjects.3 I was
attracted to La Calprenede not only by the fact that he based the
plot of three plays on English history, but by his producing in the
important period between the Cid and Polyeucte more plays than
almost any other French author. A man of such well-recognized
importance in the history of the novel deserves to be studied, if it is
only to determine the quality of his early literary activity, for it was
as a dramatist that he served his apprenticeship and acquired what
reputation he had before the publication of Cassandre. He was
hailed at his de*but by Mairet4 as of such promise that he could be

1 Published by the department of Romance Languages and Literature of Columbia
University, 1917, Lectures XII and XXI.

2 In their editions of Racine's Mithridate. Cf. for the former pp. 20-22 of his
sixth edition (Paris, Hachette, 1909); for the latter pp. 5-11 of his fourth edition (Paris,
Delagrave).

» Cf. H. Koerting, Geschichte des franzdsichen Romans im XVII. Jahrhundert (Leipzig,
1891), p. 245; Abel Lefranc, R.d.C.C., XIV, 582; G. Reynier, Histoire de la langue et de
la litterature fran$aise, edited by Petit de Julleville (Paris, Colin, 1896-99), IV, 388.

«Cf. the epttre dedicatoire to his Galanteries du due d'Ossonne, Paris, Rocolet, 1636,
and his Avertissement au Be&anqonnois Mairet (1637), cited by Marty-Laveaux, (Euvrea de
P. Corneille, III, 74, 75.

121] 1 [MoDEBN PHILOLOGY, July, 1920

2 H. C&RRINGTON LANCASTER

named among the writers whom he opposed to Corneille. Two of
his plays attracted enough interest to be re- written by later dramatists.
His Comte d' Essex was praised by Thomas Corneille and by Voltaire.
Toward the end of his career Moli£re advanced him 800 francs for
a "piece de Theastre qu'il doit faire"1 and, even though this may
be considered a recognition of his fame as a novelist rather than of
his dramatic skill, it is nevertheless a tribute from one who was at
the time the chief appraiser of an author's ability to attract an
audience.

The sources of information with regard to La Calprenede consist
chiefly of his marriage record, the prefaces to his plays, several
anecdotes told by Tallemant,2 and items from Loret's Muze his-
torique* These were collected and amplified by Moreri,4 Niceron,5
the freres Parfaict,6 and others. The conclusions of these biographers
appear substantially correct, but I would change the date of La Cal-
prenede's arrival in Paris and would add from his prefaces a little
information that has been hitherto overlooked. His full name was
Gautier de Costes de la Calprenede. The son of Pierre de Costes
and Catherine du Verdier-Genouillac, he was born at the Chateau
of Toulgoud, near Sarlat in the Diocese of Cahors,7 probably about
1610. He is said by More*ri to have studied at Toulouse. He claims
in the preface to his Mithridate that all the French he knew before
leaving Perigord was what he had read in Amadis de Gaule. The
sources of his plays indicate that he may have read not only Latin,
but Italian and English. He was a cadet, possibly an officer, in the
Guards and saw service in Germany, where he suffered from the
famine.8 Before leaving the army, he composed his first play,

1 La Grange, Registre, p. 52, under March 12, 1663.

2 Chapter CCCLXXII, Vol. VI, in the edition of MonmerquS and Paris (Paris,
Techener, 1857).

»For July 12, 1659; March 31 and October 20, 1663.

*Le grand Dictionnaire historique, especially in the edition of 1732 (Paris, Coignard)
under the title Costes.

» M emoires pour servir A I'histoire des hommes illustres (Paris, Biasson), XXXVII,
235-43. This volume appeared in 1737.

• Histoire du Theatre franyois (Paris, Le Mercier et Saillant), especially V, 148 sq.
This volume appeared in 1745.

» Of. Jal, Dictionnaire, p. 307, and Moreri, loc. cit.

• Preface to his Comte d' Essex.

122

LA CALPRENEDE DRAMATIST 3

probably toward 1635.1 If we accept this date, we must reject that
of 1632, given by More>i without proof, for his coming to Paris, as he
tells us that he wrote the play a fortnight after leaving his province.2
Tallemant3 says that he was long "un des arcs-boutants du bureau
d'adresse." La Calprenede asserts4 that he was protected by the
princesse de Guimene". He ultimately established himself at court,
where the queen, complaining one day of her ladies in waiting, found
that they were so absorbed by the story-telling of a certain young
Gascon that they had no time for their work. She thereupon sent
for La Calprenede and enjoyed at first hand his skill as a raconteur.8
He is said to have become a "gentilhomme ordinaire de la chambre
du roi."8 His marriage in 1648 to a widow of considerable notoriety7
and the circumstances of the latter portion of his life hardly concern
us, as his last published play was written no later than 1642 and his
literary efforts were subsequently devoted chiefly to the composition
of his three lengthy novels.8

What is important for us is that "il n'y a jamais eu un homme
plus gascon que cetuy-cy, "9 — for it is he and not Cyrano de Bergerac
who was the real representative of PeYigord in seventeenth-century
dramatic literature — that he was of noble birth, soldier and courtier
as well as writer. Tallemant also relates that when La Calprenede
was standing behind the scenes at the first representation of Mithri-
date, a friend called to him that his play was making a hit. " 'Chut,
chut ' luy dit-il, ' ne me nommez point; car si le pere le scavoit! Une
fois/ disoit-il, 'que le pere, qui ne vouloit pas que je fisse de vers, me
trouve comme je rimois, il se mit en colere, prit un pot de chambre,
d'argent s'entend, pour me le jetter a la teste.'" The force of this
anecdote is strengthened by the evidence of his prefaces, where

i Mairet, writing in January, 1636, op. tit., speaks of this as a recent work. Grenailles
(cf. below, loc. tit.) considers him to have been among the last of the new generation of
dramatists. The play does not appear in Mahelot's Memoire. Its privilege was not
obtained till 1636.

* Preface to his Mort de Mithridate. » Loc. cit.

« Preface to his Comte d' Essex. s of. Niceron, loc. tit. • Cf. Mor6ri, loc. cit.

7 Cf. Tallemant, loc. tit. Gossip made him out to be her sixth husband, but the
marriage contract shows that he was the third.

» Cassandre, 10 vols. (1642-1645) ; CISopdtre, 12 vols. (1647) ; Faramond, 7 vols.
(privilege, 1658; left unfinished at La Calprenede's death).

• Tallemant, loc. tit.

123

4 H. CARRINGTON LANCASTER

La Calprenede assumes a disdain for the writer's profession that is
remarkable in so voluminous an author. He is ashamed to be known
as a poet. Writing is an " amusement que Perreur du si&cle rend
presque honteux a ceux de ma profession."1 If a nobleman excels
in an art, they say, "c'est un ioiieur de Luth, c'est un musicien, c'est
un Poete." leanne d'Angleterre is a "mauvaise piece"; Edouard,
"un ouvrage si mauvais et le dernier de cette nature que je pretends
mettre au jour." He protests that he would not put his name even
to Essex, his masterpiece, if it had not already appeared on worse
plays, published in his absence and without his knowledge.

That he actually believed his work to be worthless seems improb-
able. He admits that his leanne was "cherement aimee." But he
would be classified with soldiers and courtiers rather than with
artists. His attitude is that satirized more than once by Moli&re.
All that a noble wrote must have "Pair cavalier," and smell of no
pedantry; he must compose without effort and without delay.
La Calpren&de's carelessness in matters of publication may be due to
the same cause. His first play was printed largely in his absence,
so that he had time to correct the proofs of the last act only. The
documents authorizing the printing of this play and of the two that
followed it were granted to the publisher, not to La Calprenede. He
had so little to do with the publication of leanne d'Angleterre that his
publisher thought him dead and referred to "feu M. de la Cal-
prenMe." He dedicated only three of his ten pieces and left one
of them unpublished.

His plays may be listed as follows :

1. La Mart de Mithridate, trage*die (Paris, Sommaville, 1637); dedi-
cated to the queen; privilege, Sept. 30; acheve, Nov. 16, 1636;
first played probably in 1635.

2. La Bradamante (?), tragi-come'die (Paris, Sommaville, 1637);
privilege, Feb. 7; acheve, Feb. 20.

3. Le Clarionte ou le Sacrifice sanglant, tragi-come'die (Paris, Som-
maville, 1637); privilege, Feb. 7; acheve, Aug. 3.

4. leanne Reyne d'Angleterre, tragedie (Paris, Sommaville, 1638);
dedicated by the publisher to the abbe* d'Armentiere.

* Cf. the prefaces to la Mort de Mithridate, le Comte d' Essex, and Edouard.

124

LA CALPRENEDE DRAMATIST 5

5. Le Comte d' Essex, trage*die (Paris, 1639); acheve, May 30, dedi-
cated to the princesse de Guimene; Lyon, Claude de la Riviere,
1654.1

6. Edouard, tragi-comedie (Paris, Courbe, 1640) ; privilege, Feb. 23,
1639; acheve, May 10, 1640; dedicated to the due d'Angoulesme.

7. La Mort des enfans d'Herodes ou suite de Mariane, tragedie (Paris,
Courbe*, 1639); privilege, May 15; acheve, July 2; dedicated to
Richelieu.

8. Phalante, tragedie (Paris, Sommaville, 1642); privilege, May 3,
1641; acheve, Nov. 12, 1641.

9. Hermenigilde, trage*die (Paris, Sommaville et Courbe*, 1643);
privilege, Feb. 6; acheve, Sept. 10.

10. Bellissaire, played at the H6tel de Bourgogne, July, 1659 ;2 not
printed.

11. Play to be written for Moliere.3

I. EARLY PLAYS

La Mort de Mithridate, following closely Mairet's Sophonisbe,
interests us as one of the earliest tragedies composed by writers of
Corneille's generation. It introduced its author to the dramatic
world and gave rise to at least three anecdotes that evidence a certain
notoriety.4 Mairet5 says of this play and Benserade's Cleopdtre that
the " apprentissage est un demi-chef-d'ceuvre qui donne de merveil-
leuses espe*rances des belles choses qu'ils pourront faire a Pavenir,"

1 These are the only editions to which I have had access. The Bibliotheque drama-
tique de Monsieur de Soleinne, I, 255, declares that the play was reprinted at least five
times. A copy of the Lyons edition owned by the New York Public Library is the only
copy of any of the plays I have been able to find in America.

2 Cf. Loret, Muze historique of July 12, 1659, and the freres Parfaict, op. cit., VIII*
277-78.

' Cf. La Grange, loc. cit. The Bibliotheque dramatique de Soleinne, V, supplement,
25, attributes to him la Lizimene of G. de Coste, Paris, Thomas de la Ruelle, 1632, but
as La CalprenSde's name appears nowhere else in this form and as he tells us that Mith-
ridate was his first play, this attribution seems incorrect. There was, moreover, a
dramatic author named de Coste to whom Gaillard refers in his Cartel, (Euvres MesUes,
1634, pp. 33, 34.

* I have already cited one. Another, also from Tallemant, loc. cit., tells us that "un
jour qu'il avoit un habit d'une couleur bizarre, comme tout le monde estoit en peine de
scavoir quelle couleur c'estoit: 'C'est,' dit le feu Marquis de Gesvres, 'couleur de Mith-
ridate.'" The same story in an apparently garbled form is told by Moreri, op. cit., II,
450, with the substitution for Mithridate of Silvandre, a work otherwise unknown. It is
also related that when the actor who played Mithridates at Epiphany swallowed the poison,
saying "Mais c'est trop differer," a spectator in the parterre completed the verse with
the words "le Roy boit, le Roy boit"; cf. the freres Parfaict, op. cit., V, 160.

« Loc. cit.

125

6 H. CARRINGTON LANCASTER

and declares, the following year, that Mithridate has been played as
often as any of Corneille's pieces. Grenailles insists that it "passe
pour un chef-d'oeuvre au jugement des habiles."1

The principal source is Appian. Plutarch and Florus are used
to a smaller extent.2 The subject is the death of Mithridates, as
a result of his wars with the Romans and the desertion of his son,
Pharnaces. According to Appian, the latter won over first the
Roman deserters, then other soldiers in his father's army by repre-
senting to them the danger of invading Italy, as Mithridates was
preparing to do. He was crowned king while his father "saw these
things from a high portico." Unable to escape, Mithridates gave,
poison to his two daughters, who died at once, and took some himself,
but, "although he walked about rapidly to hasten its action, it had
no effect, because he had accustomed himself to other drugs by
continually trying them as a means of protection against poisoners."3
He accordingly persuaded Bituitus, an officer of the Gauls, to kill him.

La Calprenede lays the scene at Sinope, giving as a reason that
it was one of the best towns of Mithridates' kingdom. Racine's
location of it in the Crimea is more nearly in accordance with history.
La Calprenede probably thought of Sinope because it was the town
to which Pompey returned the body of Mithridates after he had
received it from Pharnaces. When the play begins, the Romans,
contrary to history, are besieging their enemy. The scene passes
from the Roman camp to the palace of Mithridates, to the top of
the wall between. Such use of a wall occurs in several plays of
the period4 and is condemned by d'Aubignac5 on the ground that the
wall must have been stormed during the progress of the play, yet the
spectators, to whom it has been visible all the while, have seen no
such event take place. Finally, a room in the palace is represented,
cut off by a piece of tapestry that is drawn aside at the proper
moment, according to a method noted in Mahelot's Memoire.

1 Of. the preface to his Innocent Malheureux, cited by Bernardin, op. cit., p. 5.

2 Of. Appian, Roman History, Book XII, chaps, xv and xvi; Plutarch, Pompey
and Lucullus; Florus, Book I, chap. xl. It is improbable that La CalprenSde knew
either Behourt's Hypsicratee (1604) or Margarit Pageau's Monime (1600).

» Appian' a Roman History, translated by Horace White (New York, Macmillan,
1912), IV, 453, 454.

«Cf. Auvray, Dorinde; Scudery, V Amour tyrannique; Puget de La Serre, le Sac de
Carthage.

« Pratique du TheAtre (edition of Amsterdam, Bernard, 1715), I, 92 and 219.

126

LA CALPRENEDE DRAMATIST 7

The first act introduces the two groups of persons whose conflict
forms the struggle of the play. On one side are the Romans and
their new ally. Pompey is present only long enough to discuss the
ethics of Pharnaces' treachery and to hand over to him with surpris-
ing trustfulness the command of the Roman army. Within the
town we see the other group, Mithridates and the women of his
household. The second act is concerned chiefly with a last sortie of
the besieged and a description of the mental state of Pharnaces,
torn between the self-interest that has led him to the Roman camp
and the love he feels for his wife, strengthened by a certain remorse
at deserting his father.

It is with the third act that a more completely classical author
would have begun his play. The sortie has failed. The citizens of
Sinope surrender. Preparations are made to carry the palace by
assault. The only hope for the king is to win over his son. Berenice,
wife of Pharnaces, who has remained faithful to her father-in-law,
urges her husband from the top of the wall to abandon the Romans.
After she fails, Mithridates, then his daughters and his wife try to
persuade him, but in vain. The Coriolanus situation does not end
in the triumph of patriotism or filial devotion. There is nothing
left for the old king but to die and this he does magnificently in the
last act, for which the rest of the play has been but a preparation.
He and the four women of his family take poison in turn, but Mith-
ridates continues to live while the others die one by one, for his system
is so filled with antidotes that the draught has no effect upon him.
This harrowing situation is made still more intense by the news that
the Romans have broken into the palace. Mithridates now stabs
himself, leaving the order that his pale corpse be placed upon the
throne. Accordingly, when his son enters and the tapestry is drawn
aside, he sees the bodies of Mithridates and Hypsicratee on the two
thrones, those of his sisters and his wife at the king's feet. The effect
of this spectacle is further heightened by the remorse of Pharnaces
and the cynical calmness of his Roman companion.

M. Bernardin says of this tragedy: "Elle meritait d'etre mieux
e*crite; car elle renferme une fort belle scene entre le p&re et le fils,
le r61e de Be*re"nice est une creation remarquable, le denouement
porte a son comble Phorreur tragique."1 He goes on to point out

i Loc. cit. 127

8 H. C AIRING-TON LANCASTER

the superiority of Racine's Mithridate, in which the true character
of the king is preserved, though the details of history are not. I do
not think, however, that La Calprenede should be taxed with too
great fidelity to the records. He admits that he has altered his
sources by laying the scene at Sinope, introducing Pompey, creating
Berenice, causing the king's wife to be present at his death, making
of that death a suicide,1 followed by the remorse of Pharnaces. Such
changes as these are to the play's advantage and show already a
freedom of attitude toward history that is characteristic, not only
of his other plays, but of his historical novels. It is true, however, as
Bernardin points out, that he fails to grasp the full dramatic value
of Mithridates ' character, for he gives only his noble side, his courage
and patriotic hatred of the Romans, while his cruelty, his craftiness,
which Racine depicts, are omitted, as well as his interest in music
and Greek literature. As in Racine and in history, he is still a lover
and a fighter, despite his advanced age, but La Calprenede fails to
show by action the vigor of his character. The sortie is carried out
behind the scenes. The interview with his son is inspired by the
women. Only at the end do we see him acting with determination
and there the effect is spoiled by the lack of forcible phraseology.

Mithridates is not represented as a tragic hero, who dies through
his own error, but as a victim of his son's treachery and the strength
of Rome. The dramatic struggle takes place in the breast of this
son, who becomes the essential, if not the most emphasized, figure
in the play. At the risk of improbability, La Calprenede gives him
command of the Roman army in order that he may have the power
to decide for or against his father. Love and remorse weigh upon
him, but neither his wife's entreaties, his father's curse, nor the
threats of his stepmother can win him over. The character is
treated too unsympathetically to appear thoroughly dramatic. He
is a villain rather than a man who, after weighing both sides, has come
sincerely to the opinion that union with Rome is for the best interests
of Asia Minor. The presentation of the problem is, moreover, anti-
climatic, for his first interview is with his wife, who has most influence

i He gives as his reason for not having him slain, as in Appian, by the Gaul, the fact
that such an ending had already been seen in two CUopAtres. He refers, of course, to
the plays of Benserade and Mairet, which had recently appeared. In both of these
Anthony kills himself, but with the aid of an attendant.

128

LA CALPRENEDE DRAMATIST 9

upon him, the second with his father, the third with his sisters and
step-mother. Here, as in the character itself, La Calprenede shows
a certain power of dramatic conception, but with it a carelessness in
detail that makes his work ineffective.

La Calprenede prides himself on the introduction of Berenice
and attributes the success of his play largely to the manner in which
this role was interpreted by a great actress in the best troops of
Europe. She makes indeed a pathetic and noble figure. So deeply
does she feel her husband's treachery that she joins her fate to that
of his father's family rather than profit by his betrayal of them. She
pleads vainly:

Si du bonheur passe" le souvenir t'est doux,
Eleve un peu tes yeux, vois ta femme a genoux.
Considere les pleurs qui coulent sur sa face,
Et pour quels ennemis elle attend une grace :
Je parle pour tes soeurs, pour ton pere et pour moi,
Et bien plus que pour nous je demande pour toi.1

Bernardin points out the resemblance between this role and that of
Sabine, for not only are the situations of the two women somewhat
similar, but both are willing to suffer vicariously. It is by no means
improbable that Corneille found here the suggestion for this character.

The other persons are of small importance. The two daughters
are undifferentiated. The one member of Mithridates' harem
brought upon the stage is Hypsicratee, a sort of Amazon who, accord-
ing to Plutarch, accompanied the king in all his battles, dressed as a
man. Although historically justified, the character possesses little
human interest. The Romans are depicted according to tradition
as stern and cynical men of affairs, strong and grasping, unaffected
by sympathy or sentiment.

In spite of such errors as I have indicated, the play had much
to recommend it to its audiences, the struggle in the soul of Pharnaces,
the situation of Mithridates, the character of Berenice, her interview
with her husband, the meeting of father and son, finally the fifth
act with its climax of tragic horror, equaled by few plays of the period.
One cannot be overcritical of the "coup d'essai d'un jeune soldat,"
who knew of French only what he had read in Amadis and who could

i Cited by Bernardin, op. cit., p. 8.

129

10 H. CARRINGTON LANCASTER

correct the printer's errors only for the fifth act. That the play
remained on the boards for some thirty years is shown by its being
listed in Poisson's Baron de la Crasse (1662) among the plays then
popular in the provinces. It is important in the history of classical
tragedy, as it may have suggested to Racine the subject of his Mith-
ridate, to Corneille the character of Sabine, and as it is one of the
first plays of its author's generation to depict the struggles of the
Near East between the time of Alexander and the Roman conquest,
a field that was to prove rich both for French tragedy and French
romance.

Bradamante is attributed to La Calpren£de by the fr£res Parfaict
and the Bibliotheque du theatre frangois. De Beauchamps says that
this tragi-comedy, "suivant M. de C., est douteuse entre lui et le
due de Saint-Aignan." No author's name appears in the printed
play. The privilege was obtained by De Sommaville the same day
that he received permission to print La Calprenede's Clarionte. The
combat of an Amazon-like heroine would attract La Calpren&de, but
also a number of his rivals. There is no certainty that he wrote the
play, but such evidence as we have points to him rather than to any-
one else. If it is his work, it is his least original production.

The subject is the familiar story from the Orlando furioso,
cantos XLIV-XLVI, which Gamier had dramatized over half a
century before. Did the author base his play solely on Ariosto,
did he follow Gamier alone, or did he make use of both ? It would be
difficult to prove that he did not turn directly to the Orlando. If
confirmation of this statement is needed, it may be found in the
scene depicting Leon's discovery of Roger and the latter's confession
of his trip to the East, where La Calprenede follows details of the
Orlando which Gamier omits.1 On the other hand, he may have had
suggestions from Gamier, whose play was frequently reprinted down
to 1619. Evidence of such influence is not very strong, as both plays
vary little from Ariosto's narrative, but the younger dramatist may
easily have derived from his predecessor the idea of dramatizing the
story and such details as the fact that in the duel between the lovers
Roger presses Bradamante in the plays, though he only parries her

iCf. Orlando furioso, XLVI, 26, fl.; la Bradamante (Gamier), V, 1 ; la Bradamante
(La CalprenMe), IV, 1-3.

130

LA CALPRENEDE DRAMATIST 11

blows in the Orlando; the planning of Marphise's stratagem in
advance; the omission of Melisse's agency in the discovery of Roger;1
the introduction of the comic element, especially in the role of
Aymon.

Whether La Calpren£de used Gamier or not, it is interesting to
note by a comparison of the two plays the progress made in dramatic
art during the half century that separates them. Gamier had
omitted the chorus, but he had clung to the introductory monologue,
the unequal distribution of matter among the acts, the excessive use
of monologue and stereotyped dialogue, the lack of preparation for
dramatic scenes that characterize imitators of Seneca. La Cal-
pren£de begins his play with the dialogue between Roger and Le*on
in which the former agrees to fight the latter 's duel with Bradamante.
He enters at once into the heart of his subject by omitting almost all
the material which makes up Garnier's first two acts. Monologues,
though retained, are not given to characters in whom we take little
interest. The r61e of Beatrice is omitted and with it the farcical
scene of the second act, which, depicting a domestic quarrel, must
have seemed to La Calpren&de out of place, even in a tragi-comedy.
Dramatic preparation for the duel is more carefully made. The
idea of bringing Le*on and Bradamante together before the duel is
original with La Calprenede. A still more decided change lies in
the fact that this duel takes place on the stage, in the presence of
Charlemagne and his court.2 Gamier, on the other hand, does not
show Bradamante in the presence of either lover before the last scene
of the play.

The influence of the pastoral is seen in the description of the forest
to which Roger retires after the battle, where he visits the "creux
de ce rocher" and carves on a tree the statement that he has com-
mitted suicide. Interest is added to the last act by the addition of
a scene in which the court awaits the return of Roger and by a comic
ending that is not found in either of his predecessors. In his criticism

iCf. Orlando furioso, XLV, 76, 103; XLVI, 20, flf. ; la Bradamante (Gamier), IV,
1, 4; V, 1; (La CalprenSde), II, 7; III, 1-2; IV. 1-3,

2 One might think that, if Richelieu objected to the Cid on account of the duel,
although it is neither acted on the stage nor approved by the king, much more would he
have disapproved of this play, and that the fact that it was published anonymously
might be due to this cause. I am not inclined, however, to press this point, in view of the
frequency of duels in French plays of the period.

131

12 H. CAfcRiNGTON LANCASTER

of Garnier's play Faguet1 points out that the Bulgarian ambassadors
constitute a deus ex machind. La Calprenede introduces them only
once, after the king has acknowledged Roger to be the victor, an
improvement over Garnier's method, but like the latter he uses
their offer of a throne as a means of winning Aymon's consent to the
marriage of his daughter and thus lays himself open to a similar
criticism.

How far this tragi-comedy still falls short of the purely classical
French play may be seen by comparing it with Thomas Corneille's
Bradamante,2 written a half century later. There the unities of
time and place are preserved. Roger and Bradamante are brought
together frequently before the end of the play. The spectacular
duel takes place behind the scenes. The comic passages disappear.
Superfluous figures, Renaud and Naymes, are omitted. Aymon and
the Bulgarians, though figuring in the plot, are not seen on the stage.
Even the role of deus ex machind is somewhat softened by having the
arrival of the Bulgarians announced at the end of the fourth act.
There is no evidence of influence exerted by either Gamier or La Cal-
prenede on Thomas Corneille, who asserts that he draws his plot
from Ariosto.3

A tragi-comedy called le Clarionte ou le Sacrifice sanglant was
published the same year. Clarionte, a Corsican prince, and his
fiancee, Rosimene, daughter of the king of Sardinia, are shipwrecked on
the Island of Majorca, where the young man is condemned by reason
of his beauty to be sacrificed to the sun. Rosimene and the daughter
of the hostile king of Majorca offer to die in his place, while he insists
they shall not, thus fulfilling the oracle's demand that the sacrifice
continue till three fair victims contend for an honor whose prize
is death. But the king will not release Clarionte until he is con-
quered by the latter's brother, who with his sister and an army arrive
in time to save the hero both from the sacrificial block and the pursuit
of the king's daughter, and to end the play in a triple marriage.

* La tragtdie franyaise au XVI« si&cle (Paris and Leipzig, Welter, 1897), pp. 218-19.
bef r PubUshed in 1696' Tne autnor implies in his preface that he wrote it fifteen years

« M. Marsan in his critical edition of Mairet's Sylvie, Paris, Socittt nouvelle de librarie
et d Edition, 1905, p. 231, notes that a line from La CalprenSde's play, III, 4,

Amolliroient sans doute un coeur de diamant,
is an imitation of line 2048 in Sylvie,

Amolliroient-ils pas des coeurs de diamant.

132

LA CALPRENEDE DRAMATIST 13

The source of this tragi-comedy is unknown. The characters
and incidents are those of many heroic or pastoral romances. The
shipwreck, the sacrifice to the sun, the oracle are familiar to readers
of Heliodorus. The woodland scenes, the carving on trees, the
princess who hides in a forest, the deus ex machind, and the triple
marriage are not uncommon in pastoral plays. The contest in
generosity which gives the play its most distinctive feature has its
parallel in various works of the period.1 The most modern element
in the play is the fact that the country has been ravaged by religious
wars. The structure, as in Bradamante, is looser than that of La
Calprenede's tragedies. There is nothing in the characters to
distinguish them from the usual noble and beautiful heroes and
heroines of tragi-comedy.

II. ENGLISH PLAYS

La Calpren&de now returned to the field of his first success,
historical tragedy, but sought in English history the source of his
plots. The fact that he was attracted to the Tudors suggests that
he aimed in his leanne d'Angleterre to re-write the Ecossaise of Mont-
chrestien in much the same way as he may have re-written Garnier's
Bradamente. In the Ecossaise he found not only a subject from recent
English history, but the story of a Tudor queen who reluctantly
condemns to death a captive princess on the charge of conspiring
against her. In both this play and his leanne d'Angleterre the queen
feels sympathy for her captive cousin; the council of nobles insists
on the execution, the decision is reached between the acts, the con-
demned princess not only displays courage, but refers to her death
as a happy event.2 Instead, however, of merely adapting the older
tragedy to the dramatic technique of his day, he selected a different
event, the execution of Lady Jane Grey. The historical account was
apparently known to him through Italian rather than English or

1 Of. Hardy, Gesippe, Theatre, IV (Rouen, David Du Petit Val), 1626; Chevreau.
Les deux Amis (Paris, Courb6, 1638); Du Ryer, Clarigene, Paris, Sommaville, 1639;
Reynier, Le Roman sentimental avant V Astree (Paris, Colin, 1908), pp. 78, 85. A some-
what similar contest between lovers, one of whom is to be sacrificed in order to avert
calamity from a country, is found subsequently in Scude"ry's epic, Alaric (edition of
Paris, Loyson, 1673), pp. 54-63.

2 Minor resemblances occur. The phrase " a gros bouillons" is used by both writers
in describing the execution; "fay tomber le chef bas et voler 1'ame aux cieux" becomes
"le corps tombe sanglant et son ame s'envole"; in both cases the severed head bounces
after striking the ground. Cf. Les tragedies de Montchrestien, edited by Petit de Julle-
ville (Paris, Plon, 1891), pp. 108-10.

133

14 H. CAI?RINGTON LANCASTER

French sources.1 He followed them particularly in the meeting of
Mary and Norfolk at the Tower, the trial of Northumberland, and
the execution of Jane and her husband. He omits certain important
elements, especially the religious question and Wyatt's uprising.
To have treated the first would have lost for his heroine the sympathy
of his Catholic audience, while it would have been difficult to intro-
duce Wyatt without destroying the unity of his play.

The tragedy begins just before the arrest of Lady Jane. With
her husband and her father-in-law she is shut up in London much
as Mithridates and his family had been besieged in Sinope. At the
end of the first act, however, the two plots separate, for, while
Mithridates held out to the end, Lady Jane and her relatives surrender
and are placed in the Tower. The second act gives two scenes a
faire, Mary's deliberation as to what shall be done with her prisoners
and Lady Jane's interview with her in which she defends her coup
d'etat on the ground that Edward VI had left her the crown. In the
third act La Calpren&de gives the first example of his favorite
dramatic device, the formal trial. Northumberland is arraigned
before a jury of his peers, presided over by Norfolk, recently released
from the Tower. The conditions of the trial are announced by the
chancellor. The court rules, after Northumberland has made the
plea, that he had acted in accordance with a statute of Henry VIII and
that he should not be tried by men as guilty as he. Two of the lords
reply to his accusation against them. His fate is left in Mary's hands.

After further consultation, the queen compromises between the
general condemnation urged by Elizabeth and the pardon to which
her sympathy for Lady Jane makes her incline, by condemning
Northumberland and Guilford, setting free the former's daughters,
and referring Lady Jane's case to the lords. As one trial has already
been shown, Lady Jane's takes place behind the scenes. We learn
in the fifth act that it has resulted in her condemnation. On taking
leave of the warden, she gives him a "diamant," evidently considered

* He is certainly nearer to the account given by Pollini in his Historia ecclesiastica
i?«me; 1594)> PP.' 25° fl> and 264 fl" and to Rosso- Biatoria d'Inghilterra (Ferrara,
1591) , foho 6 — folio 58, than he is to Holinshed, Grafton, Foxe, or De Thou. For example,
the name d'Erby, given by the Italians to the warden, is used by La CalprenSde, while
in the English versions he is called Bridges or Bruges. Cf. Holinshed, Chronicles
(London, 1808) IV, 23; Grafton, Chronicle (London, 1809), II, 543; Foxe, Acts and
Monument* (London, Pratt) (4th edition), VI, 424; de Thou, Hiatoire univeraelle (London,
1734) II, 414, 428-30. I have been unable to consult Michelangelo Florio, Historia de
la vtta e de la morte de I' Illustrissima Signora Giovanna Graia, 1607.

134

LA CALPREN£DE DRAMATIST 15

a more princely gift than the book with which she actually presented
him. The play ends with a description of the heroine's death and
the expression of the queen's remorse.

While a certain interest attaches to the men, the English lords
engaged in trying the leader with whom they had recently con-
spired, the pathetic Guilford, the more forceful Northumberland,
beaten, but still fighting desperately with his wits, one is chiefly
attracted by the three princesses. Jane is the victim, first of her
father-in-law, who forced her to accept the crown, then of her judges.
She feels, even before her arrest, that she is doomed, though she
warns Glocester that her power may return and argues with Mary in
her own defense. There is reference to her "bel esprit," but little
use is made of her dialectic ability. The necessary love interest is
supplied by scenes that show her devotion to Guilford. Whatever
qualms she may have felt at usurping the throne are not translated
into action, for the play does not begin soon enough for us to see her
at the moment of her choice. If La Calprenede could have intro-
duced the religious motive, he would have better explained why she
conspired and kept the character dramatic to the end, as Corneille
did in the case of Polyeucte. He would also have strengthened his
treatment of Mary and rendered her action toward Jane less hard
to understand. As it is, Jane cannot struggle, while Mary's char-
acter lacks motivation. Her sister Elizabeth is the most Cornelian
of the three. She is represented here from the Catholic point of view
as a cruel and vengeful woman, unmoved by the fate of her enemies.

It is regrettable that this interesting subject, full of dramatic
possibilities and appearing at a time when its example might have
been widely followed, was handled by a writer who did not have the
necessary stylistic and dramatic talent to make the most of it. The
originality shown in the choice of subject, the sympathetic appre-
ciation of both Mary and Jane, and the rendering of certain scenes
are highly commendable, but the interest is scattered over persons
whose actions are not sufficiently interdependent and the main action
does not come near enough to filling the play. Jane's trial, if properly
developed, might have supplied the lacking struggle, but it takes
place behind the scenes. The third act is concerned entirely with
Northumberland, while the fourth merely repeats the second. These

135

16 H. CARRINGTON LANCASTER

shortcomings may account for the play's lack of success, but credit
must be given it for opening a new field and preparing the way for
its author's chef d'ceuvre.

This was the Comte d'Essex, a play that attracts our attention
at once by the peculiar interest of its plot. The love of Queen
Elizabeth for the Earl of Essex and her refusal to pardon him when
condemned for treason formed, even without the romantic ampli-
fications that were subsequently supplied, a dramatic theme that
quickly found its way into various fields of literature.1 Interest in
the subject may have been enhanced for a French audience by the
recollection that Essex had led the expeditionary force sent to aid
Henri IV against the League. His execution had taken place in 1601,
less than thirty-eight years before La Calprenede dramatized the
event. The Comte d'Essex is the first place,2 as far as I can ascertain,
where the story appears that Elizabeth gave Essex a ring with the
promise that any crime he might commit would be pardoned when
he returned it, that, after his condemnation, he sent her the ring with
a plea for mercy, but that the woman to whom it was intrusted did
not deliver it till after the earl's execution. This legend, which
received wide currency and has been accepted by some writers, even
in recent years, as historical, occurs in several versions, inasmuch as
the woman's failure to deliver the ring has been explained in various
ways. As no one has attempted to describe how the story arose and
how these versions are related to one another, I would offer a few
suggestions in regard to them, which will show the importance of
La Calprenede in the history of the tale.

The grounds for believing that the story is not historical are that
none of the evidence for it is contemporary, that none of the several
well-authenticated accounts of Elizabeth's death make mention of
the incident, and that Essex said nothing about it at the time of his
execution.3 Yet La Calprenede's testimony shows that the story
had already been formed some time before he wrote, apparently in

* Cf. Richard Schiedermair, Der Graf von Essex in der Literatur (Kaiserslautem, 1908).

2 The D.N.B. cites nothing earlier than the middle of the seventeenth century.
Ranke, Englische Geschichte (Leipzig, 1870), pp. 344-45, declares that it first appears in
Aube'ry's M emoires pour servir d I'histoire de Hollande (1680). A Spanish play. El Conde
del Sex, printed just before La Calprenede's, has an utterly different plot with no reference
to the story of the ring.

*Cf. Edinborough Review, 1853, XCVIII, 161-65, and D.N.B., XIV, 437, 438. The
argument is weakened, but not materially, by La Calprenede's evidence.

136

LA CALPRENEDE DRAMATIST 17

English oral tradition. "Si vous trouuez quelque chose dans ceste
Tragedie," he writes in his preface, "que vous n'ayez point leu dans
les Historiens Anglois, croyez que ie ne Fay point inuente*, et que ie
n'ay rien escrit que sur de bonnes [sic] memoires que i'en auois
receues de personnes de condition et qui ont peut-estre part a 1'His-
toire." The legend must have grown up partly out of an effort to
reconcile the historical facts of the queen's affection for Essex and
her signing his death warrant, partly out of some account of a ring
given by a sovereign to a favorite in order to circumvent the law to
his advantage. The first attempt at explanation is a statement, said
to have been made by Elizabeth to the due de Biron,1 that, had it
not been for the earl's pride, she would have pardoned him. But
this was not satisfactory, for accounts of his death show Essex to
have been almost unduly penitent on the scaffold. An undelivered
message would easily explain this seeming contradiction. The use
of a token under such circumstances was common enough practice.
That this token should take the form of a ring previously given with
a promise by the queen may have been determined by the fact that
Henry VIII once gave a ring to Cranmer to enable him to appeal
from his council to himself.2 I can find no other story of a ring that
would so readily have played a part in forming the Essex tradition.
In the earliest form of the story the only motive attributed to
the person who prevented the delivery of the ring was probably
personal enmity, for this is the only cause given in the version attri-
buted to Sir Dudley Carleton,3 but jealousy could easily be added,
as is the case in La Calprenede's play. The difficulty of explaining
how a woman who was in love with Essex could fail to deliver the
ring probably suggested the addition of the third woman, found in
the History of the most renowned Queen Elizabeth and her, great Favorite,*

1 Histoires memorables, 1607.

2 The story is told by Cranmer's secretary Ralph Morice, whose manuscript was not
published till it appeared in the Narratives of the Days of the Reformation, edited by J. G-
Nichols, Camden Society, 1859, pp. 455-59, but it was used by Foxe and formed the
basis of Shakespeare's Henry VIII, V, 1-3. By this means Cranmer escaped punish-
ment, an event which shows that the extraordinary thing about the story of Elizabeth's
ring is not that she gave it to Essex, but that he failed to put it to use.

» Of. Bayle, Dictionnaire, p. 1063 in the edition of Amsterdam (Bohm, 1720) . The
account is taken from Aub6ry du Maurier, who declared that the story was told Prince
Maurice by Sir Dudley Carleton, English ambassador to Holland. Essex is supposed
to have given the ring to a relative, wife of Admiral Howard, who forced her to keep it
till after the execution.

4 This account appeared toward the middle of the century according to the D.N.B.,
loc. cit., and was followed by Francis Osborn in his Traditionall Memories of Elizabeth

137

18 H. CARRINGTON LANCASTER

according to which the queen, the Countess of Nottingham, and the
Countess of Rutland were rivals for Essex's love.

La Calprenede formed his tragedy largely out of this legend,
sprung, perhaps, from the union in the popular mind of a real event
in the reign of Henry VIII and court gossip concerning the queen's
love of the earl. To this he added details from Bacon's account1 of
the trial and execution of Essex, combining the original accusation of
intelligence with the Irish leader, Tyrone, and the charges based on
his subsequent attempt to seize the queen's person. He may not only
have added the love of Lady Cecil and Essex for each other, but have
identified Lady Cecil with the woman who prevented the ring from
reaching the queen, for in other accounts other names are given her.

The play begins with an interview between Elizabeth and Essex,
in which she charges him with treachery and urges him to confess,
but he remains defiant and is soon arrested with his friend, Southamp-
ton. Already the psychological interest is introduced by a monologue
in which Elizabeth wavers between her love for Essex and her duty
to the country. The ring motive is prepared by the hero's dark
hint that he has "des gages" which will prevent his disgrace. As
subsequently in Cinna, the second act begins with a conference
between the ruler and two advisers. Cecil urges severity, while
Salisbury recommends justice. Before making her decision, Eliza-
beth seeks to induce Essex to humble himself and send her the ring.
For this purpose she dispatches Lady Cecil to have an interview with
him in prison. We now learn that Lady Cecil has been his mistress
and that he has deserted her. When Essex sees her, his love returns,
but he refuses to ask pardon for offenses against the queen that he
denies having committed. The trial scene, already used in leanne
d'Angleterre, is developed until it occupies the whole of the third act.
Essex and Southampton are brought before the court over which
Popham presides and of which Raleigh, Cecil, and Salisbury are
members. Essex, far from showing contrition, attacks his enemies,

(1658), John Banks in his Unhappy Favorite, and many other writers. It is probably
this History and its descendants that M. Reynier has in mind when he speaks of the
sources of Thomas Corneille's Essex in his Thomas Corneille (Paris, Hachette, 1892), p. 171.

i A Declaration of the Practices and Treasons Attempted and Committed by Robert, late
Earl of Essex, and his Complices, 1601; cf. Works of Francis Bacon (Philadelphia, Carey
and Hart, 1842), II, 348 fl. There may have been an intermediate source, but it was
not de Thou, whose account (op. cit., XIII, 574-89) omits details found both in Bacon
and La Calprenede.

138

LA CALPRENEDE DRAMATIST 19

denies his guilt, and boasts of his achievements. Southampton
makes a more substantial defense, claiming that the letter to Tyrone
is a forgery and that Essex's acts of apparent rebellion are merely
efforts to resist his enemies. The court remains unconvinced by
this plea and Popham condemns both earls to death.

But the queen pardons Southampton and delays the execution of
Essex. The latter now begs Lady Cecil to take the ring to the queen.
His declared motive is love of Lady Cecil, to whom he would confide
his life and honor in order to convince her that he still loves her.
Quitting the prison with the ring, she hesitates between her love of
Essex and her desire for revenge. In this quandary she consults
her husband and with him leaves the stage. Essex now enters,
surrounded by guards who lead him to execution, just as Mariane
had been led out in Tristan's play. He insists upon his innocence,
sending word to Lady Cecil that he regrets the useless trouble to
which he has put her. The news of his execution is brought to the
queen, whose grief is restrained by the thought that she has put
to death a traitor. But Lady Cecil summons her to her bed-side
and, now at the point of death from remorse, confesses her relations
with Essex and her husband's part in her failure to deliver the ring.
Elizabeth swoons, then curses Lady Cecil, mourns Essex at length,
and comments on her own approaching death.

The chief struggle of the play lies in the soul of the queen. When
Essex intimates that he can control her, Southampton replies (I, 5) :
Le desir de regner estouffera tousiours
Quelques ardeurs qu'elle ayt, le soin de ses amours.

It is the amplification of this couplet that forms the play. Once
convinced of her favorite's guilt, she succeeds in stifling her love for
him, but, hoping to find in his repentance justification for pardon,
she makes every effort to induce him to send her the ring. She is
a much more complex character than the earlier Elizabeth of leanne
d'Angleterre. She differs from the Elizabeth of Thomas Corneille
in that she is represented as an old woman,1 that she has a real
feeling of duty to the state, and that she is not at all jealous. The
character is in keeping with the prevailing conception of Elizabeth,

1 Of . II, 5, "Qu'elle quitte 1'amour, son aage Ten dispence." Voltaire, (Euvret
completes (Paris, Gamier, 1880), XXXII, 328, implies that Thomas CorneiUe's queen is
also old, but the lines of his play do not make such interpretation necessary.

139

20 H. CARRINGTON LANCASTER

who constantly put the interest of England above the vagaries of
her heart.

Essex is described as a haughty and unrestrained character, not
unlike Rotrou's Ladislas.1 His sarcasm suggests Nicomede. When
brought before his judges, he arraigns them as follows:

Done Barons souuerains, done luges equitables
Qui pour nous occupez ces sieges redoutables, ...
Arbitres absolus du destin de nos testes
S$auez-vous qui ie suis, sgauez-vous qui vous estes ?
Et bien qu'en vos faueurs mon destin m'ait trahy,
Vous souuient-il encor de m'auoir obey ?

Unfortunately the character is not represented with sufficient clarity.
The evidence of his guilt is strong. His friend and he produce
nothing to disprove it. Yet the fact that he never acknowledges his
guilt, not even in private conversation with Southampton or Lady
Cecil, must have outweighed with the audience the testimony sub-
mitted to his discredit, for d'Aubignac2 praises the skill by which the
spectators are brought to believe that Essex ought not to die: "Et
plus on trouve de motifs pour croire qu'il ne doit point mourir, plus
on a de douleur de sgavoir qu'il doit mourir." It is also not clear
whether his preliminary refusal to appeal to the queen is due to
fortitude or calculation. As soon as he has been sentenced, he gives
the ring to Lady Cecil, saying that his love for her is the reason for
his action, but as this devotion is not strong enough to save him from
Lady Cecil's vengeance, it also fails to convince the reader. It
remains possible to regard the hero either as the high-minded victim
of political enemies or as a courtier who has sacrificed to his personal
ambition his loyalty both to the queen and to his mistress. Either
kind of character could be made dramatic, but the confusion of the
two must, despite the critic's praise, have diminished the play's success.
Thomas Corneille subsequently avoided the difficulty by generously
whitewashing his hero. His Essex is not guilty of designs on the
crown, is secretly married to the queen's rival, is obviously a victim.
Lady Cecil's is a dramatic role, but we do not see her enough to
understand her actions. She still loves Essex and he has returned

i The passionate force of Rotrou's hero is attributed to the fact that Venceslas is
based on a Spanish tragedy, but in Essex we have an earlier example of such a character
on the French stage without there being any evidence of Spanish influence.

a Pratique du thSdtre (Amsterdam, 1715), II, 125.

140

LA CALPRENEDE DRAMATIST 21

to her, yet she is so eager for vengeance that she yields to her hus-
band's persuasion and allows him to be put to death. The manner
in which she came to this decision needed to be explained, but, with
a strange indifference to the scene d faire, La Calprenede put behind
the scenes the interview between Cecil and his wife. The minor
persons are unusually well characterized. Southampton is a friend
whose devotion carries him almost to the point of threatening the
queen.1 Cecil and Raleigh, political enemies of Essex, are as cold
and relentless as the latter is outbreaking. Popham is the high-
minded judge, serenely indifferent to the passions of his associates.

One can understand why the play attracted enough attention
to warrant Thomas Corneille's re-working it forty years later
and Boyer's writing a play on the same subject. It is constantly
dramatic, in that the fate of Essex hangs in the balance throughout
almost the whole play. A queen between love and duty, a fasci-
nating hero, a trial, the melodramatic story of the ring assured
its success. I have pointed out certain shortcomings in the play.
There is also unnecessary repetition. Strangely enough the two
chief characters do not appear together on the stage after the first
act. As time went on and Corneille's public became Racine's, the
ring lost its charm, love attracted more than duty to the state,
clearer exposition of character and greater respect for the proprieties
were demanded. If we consider these facts, we can understand the
changes that Thomas Corneille found it necessary to make. In his
play the ring and the accompanying element of chance are omitted,
the leading characters are changed as I have pointed out, the trial
is reduced to a brief recit. Less interesting as an attempt to repro-
duce the past, Thomas Corneille's tragedy is clearer, more con-
centrated, in closer accord with the technique of his day. It is in this
form that the play continued to be represented and read. La Cal-
prenede's Essex suffered the fate of Moliere's Don Juan, similarly
re-worked by Thomas Corneille. But there has been no corresponding
attempt to resuscitate this interesting play.

H. CARRINGTON LANCASTER

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

av, 3.

[To be concluded]
141

SOME ROLAND EMENDATIONS

It is well understood that the unstressed pronouns me, te, etc.,
do not regularly stand after a pause or begin the sentence in Old
French, and that this is also true of the adverbs i and en, the position
of all these words being that of enclitics, not of proclitics. It is intelli-
gible that sooner or later they came to be used also as proclitics, and
yet may have continued to preserve, and perhaps for a considerable
time, the old position in the sentence. The words Nen i ad eel
(Roland, 2545) may serve as a starting point from which it may be
argued that this process began in the course of the twelfth century,
if not even earlier, in the case of i and probably of en. I am here
concerned only with the Roland as seen in the Anglo-French of the
Oxford manuscript, and with the probable early form of the poem
near the beginning of the twelfth century.

Neither Nen i ad eel (vs. 2545) nor Cel nen i ad (vss. 822 and
1618) can cause any difficulty as being peculiar; the form nen
before a vowel is well enough known as old, and eel (or icel) is the
normal original form of the accusative. But when we find N'i1
ad celoi at the beginning of vs. 411 we may well pause to examine
this and other instances of the impersonal expression with the
negative and the pronoun eel, icel, or celui. Not that the shorter
form ne does not often occur, and this before a vowel naturally
becomes n', but obviously nen is the older form, and one is tempted
to restore nen whenever possible in this position in the Roland text,
especially in this expression, which occurs so often as to give the
impression of being one of the so-called epic formulas. That it is a
formula — not necessarily an epic formula — or at least was in common
idiomatic use, appears from the fact that it is found in Alexis, vs. 555,
Cel nen i at (MS L has Cel nen mat), where Paris printed Cel n'en i at
(so also in the edition of 1911); cf. also vs. 554, Nul(s) nen i at.
For an example in continental Old French see Chretien's Ivain,
vs. 6132, in Foerster's edition, N'i a celui, ne soil bleciez, where the

1 I print N'i lor convenience; of course the manuscript has Ni (strictly speaking N i).
143] 23 [MODEBN PHILOLOGY, July, 1920

24 E. S. SHELDON

absence of en before i indicates that nen is to be preferred to n'en in
the Alexis line as in the Roland, for this formula. At least it seems
best to restore nen when N'i or perhaps N'en (the en from i n d e)
occurs at the beginning of a Roland line. The negative, to be sure,
in N'i or N'en still stands before the i, which does not technically
begin the sentence, but ne is reduced to the consonant n, and the i
(or en) makes in pronunciation with the n the first syllable of the
line; phonetically considered ni is the first word. This means that
if the sentence begins with N'i the i is really proclitic, and the case
for N'en is similar. The grammatical terms "enclitic" and "pro-
clitic" have no sense except as referring to pronunciation. More-
over in such a formula the fuller form nen is likely to have been
longer preserved than elsewhere.

This situation — N'i at the beginning of the line — is presented in
the Oxford MS for our formula in vss. 411, 1803, 1814, 1836, 3462,
all of which show N'i ad celoi, easily corrected to Nen i ad eel, as in
2545; and in 1845 and 3540 N'i ad icel, readily changed to the same
Nen i ad eel. In 3418 Ne niad eel is the MS reading. Stengel
prints Ne n'i ad eel, but Nen i ad eel seems to be the true form. In
3805 Neni ad celoi is in the MS; Stengel has N'i ad celui but Nen i
ad eel seems better. Including 2545 (and also 822 and 1618 in
which Cel begins the line) we find twelve cases of our formula,
ten with Nen i ad eel, two with Cel nen i ad, if my corrections are
acceptable.

Should we take another step and change every line beginning
with N'i ad or N'en ad, whatever word follows as the object of ad?
Also we might notice a few cases not showing the impersonal ad.
The following examples may be noticed: in vss. 22, 854, 960, N'i ad
paien, one might read Paien n'i ad; in 290, Jo i puis aler, where
Stengel has J'i puis aler, perhaps Puis i aler or Aler i puis; in 755, N'i
perdrat Carles li reis ki France tient, perhaps Nen i perdrat Carles [or li
reis] ki France tient; in 758, Neni perdrat, that is, Nen i perdrat, though
Stengel's Ne n'i perdrat is also possible; in 810, N'en descendrat,
possibly Ne descendrat, cf. 1751; in 1522, N'i ad echipre, perhaps
Nen est eschipre, cf. 1555, Beste nen est, and 1733, N'ert mais tel
home; in 1751, N'en mangerunt, perhaps to be changed to Nes
mangerunt; or one might even think of Ne 'n, omitting the e of en

144

SOME " ROLAND" EMENDATIONS 25

instead of the e of ne; cf . sin for si en; in 2467, II neni ad barge ne
drodmund ne caland should probably be read Nen i ad barge ne
drodmund ne caland; though Stengel's II n'i ad barge, etc., is admis-
sible, yet the older form without il seems better; in 2522, N'i ad
cheval, perhaps Cheval n'i ad; in 2753, Stengel's N'en irat Charles
is very likely wrong; it would be nearer the MS if we should read
Et puis li dites: il n'en irat sem creit;1 cf. 1728, Sem creisez (where a
small e is added after Sem and above the line in Stengel's printing
of the MS); in 3169, N'i ad Franceis, perhaps Franceis n'i ad; in
3665, N'i remeindrat, perhaps better Nen i remaint; in 3789, N'i ad
Frances, cf. 3169; 3908, Nen recrerrai, where Stengel prints N'en
recrerrai, should not improbably be Nem recrerrai; for the reflexive
pronoun cf . 3892, car te recreiz.

It is, however, unsafe to make all these changes outside of our
formula solely because i or en appears to be proclitic, for the pro-
clitic use may be even older. In the Alexis as edited by Paris (I
refer to the edition of 1911 in Les Classiques frangais du moyen dge)
I find, vs. 3, S'i ert credance (in the editions of 1872 and 1885 he read
Si ert, etc., but in 1903 S'i appears); 138, N'i remest paile; 165,
N'en vuelt torner, which is closely connected in sense with what pre-
cedes; 430, N'i out si dur; 556, N'i vient enfers. Not all these half-
lines lend themselves readily to emendation, and this throws doubt
on the changes suggested in the preceding paragraph for vss. 22,
etc., in the Roland. Still, I look on all these cases in the Alexis
with some suspicion of alterations by copyists.

E. S. SHELDON

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

» This, it will be observed, avoids putting either n'en or an unstressed personal pro-
noun immediately after the caesural pause.

145

THE MADRID MANUSCRIPT OF THE SPANISH GRAIL

FRAGMENTS1

A description of this MS was given by Morel-Fatio, Romania, X
(1881), 300. Evidently without any knowledge of Morel-Fatio's
description, Klob gave another in ZrP, XXVI (1902), 185. The
following description is meant not so much to correct some slight
mistakes of my predecessors as to supplement their statements.

The MS consists of three hundred and one numbered folios.
Two successive folios bear the number 174, while f. 254 is followed
by f. 256, though there is no gap in the story.2 The last folio,
numbered 302, should be 301. At the beginning there are four
folios, all of them blank with the exception of about one-half of the
verso of the last, where we read as follows:
1f En este libro ay ocho tratados:

If El primero, que se llama flox sanctorum, que es libro de fueros de leyes I
1f El segundo de la vida de Berlan e del infante Josafa XCIIII

IT El tergero de la vida de los sanctos padres CCXIII

If El quarto del libro de Frey Johan de Rrocacisa CCXXXVTIP

1f El quinto de Josep Abarimatia . CCLI

If El sesto de Merlin CCLXXXII

1f El septimo de los articulos e fe de los cristianos CCXCVI

1f El octavo de Langarote CCXCVIII

The Langarote fragment ends on f . 300V with this subscription :
Escriptus fuyt anno Domini M°CCCC°LXX. Petrus Ortiz.

There follow four folios; the last three are partly covered with
scribbling; the verso of the first is blank, the recto contains this
statement :

< f . 302 > En este libro son copilados onze tratados. 1f El primero se llama
libro del arra del anima. De como se rrazona el cuerpo con el anima e el anima
con el cuerpo. E aun es llamado dialogo. 1f El segundo de la vida de
Sant Macario e de Sergio e Alchino. En como fueron ver su santa vida
a una cueva cerca el parayso terrenal. ^f El tergero de la vida de Berlan e

1 This article is printed here, without change, as prepared in 1914 for publication
in the series of the " Gesellschaf t fur romanische Literatur."

2 1 shall disregard the misnumbering in the present article.

» Should be CCXXXVII.
147] 27 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, July, 1920

28 ' K. PIETSCH

del infante Josafa. 1[ El quarto tratado de las vidas de los1 sanctos padres.
^ El quinto es de Frey Johan de Rrocagisa. H El sesto de Josep Abarimatia,
e el qual libro es llamado del Sancto Grial, que es el escodilla en que comio
Nuestro Senor Jesu Cristo el jueves de la gena con sus discipulos, en la qual
escodilla cogio Josep la sangre del nuestro Salvador Jesu Cristo. ^[ El VII.
tratado2 es llamado el libro de Merlin. ^ El VIII. el libro de Tungano. ^ El
IX. de los articulos e sancta fe de los cristianos. ^[ El X. fabla de Langarote
e del rrey Artus e su mugier.
f 1] T[3Libro del arra del anima I

Libro de fueros, en [el] qual se conjtienenj quatro lib[ros]4

f 2] ^[ Libro de la vida de Sant Macario XXIII

H Libro de la vida de Berlan e de Josafa XXXIII

^ Libro de la vida de los santos padres CLIII

H Libro de Frey Juan de Rrocagisa CLXXVII

1T Libro de Josep Abarimatia CXCI

If Libro de Merlin CCXXI

1T Tratado de los articulos e fe de los cristianos CCXXXV

If Tratado de Langarote CCXXXVI

[10] H Libro de Tungano CCXL

[11] 1f Sermo Domini. Vocatum est nomen ejus Jesus CCLXXIX

[12] H Rreglas de la yglesia de Leon para rrezar CCLXXXVIF

E este libro se acabo Anno Domini M°CCCCLXIX.

Petrus Ortiz clericus.

We have then three tables of contents, one, at the beginning of the
MS, referring to it in its present state, and the other two referring
to it in an older state.

Not to speak of some minor discrepancies between the last two
tables, this much seems clear. The MS in its old state dates from
1469. For some reason, Petrus Ortiz omitted the first two texts
mentioned in the second and third tables and substituted for them
the Libro de fueros. He likewise omitted the last three texts, the
Langarote fragment thus becoming the last text of the MS in its
new state. He finally added another subscription in which the
word "Escriptus" has to be interpreted as "arranged."

1 MS las. 2 MS tratato.

•The paragraph marks are canceled before 1L 1, 2, 10, 11, 12.

< A later addition. The scribe wrote en los qual, canceled los, but forgot to put in
the proper word.

« These Roman numerals agree with an older pagination of the preserved parts of
the MS (concerning Lancarote it should read CCXXXVII). These older numerals
have been partly erased, partly not; they have also been used for a new pagination.

148

MADRID MANUSCRIPT OF SPANISH GRAIL FRAGMENTS 29

Further, a comparison of the pagination of the last table and that
of the first shows that La vida de Berlan as well as the following texts
down to Langarote have been preserved in their original size.

As for the texts now lacking, Morel-Fatio identifies the Libro
del arm del anima with the Vision de Filiberto (ZrP, II, 50). I
suppose he decided for the prose Visio Philiberti as conforming better
to the character of the MS than a poetic version of the Contentio
animae et corporis. To me the words arm del anima seem to corre-
spond better to Hugo of S. Victor's1 De arrhaanimce, Migne, CLXXVII,
c. 951. The full title reads: Soliloquium de arrha animce. Inter-
locutores sunt homo et anima. It is true, neither soliloquium nor
homo fit the dialogo or cuerpo of the Spanish description. On the other
hand, the probable length of the lost Spanish text (twenty-two
folios) accords better with Hugo's work (eighteen cols.) than the
Filiberto (eleven folios).

The Libro de la vida de Sant Macario was the Vita fabulosa S.
Marcarii Romani, servi Dei, qui inventus est juxta Paradisum, auctori-
bus Theophilo, Sergio et Hygino, AA. SS. Oct. X, 566. The
legend was little known (Grober's Grundr., II, 1, 482). I have found
no trace of another copy.2

The most recent writer on the Libro de Tungano in the Iberian
Peninsula is probably Mene*ndez y Pelayo, Origenes de la novela, I
(1905), CLXXXV. Strange to say, he speaks only of the Toledo,
1526, edition. From Salva, whom he quotes, he could have learned
of an earlier edition, Sevilla, 1508 (Bibl. Colomb.; cf. Gallardo, II,
530, 3257), and from Baist, whom he likewise quotes, of a " Vision
del Caballero de Ibernia in Cod. Toled. 17, 6 ms s. XIV." Finally, of
the Portuguese versions that Mene*ndez points out, the one in the
National Library at Lisbon has been printed by Esteves Pereira,
Rev. lusitana, III (1895), 97 (Visao de Tundalo), the other in the

1 For Hugo of S. Victor in Spain, cf . Beer, Handschriftenschatze Spaniens, 467 (Tarra-
gona), 513 (Urgel), 549 (Vich), 550 (ibid.).

A Catalan translation of De arrha animce is mentioned by Morel-Patio, Grober's
Grundr., II, II, 96 ( =Beer, 531).

2 Baist, Grttber's Grundr., II, II, 445, says: " Die Macariuslegende fand sichin einer
Toledaner Hs., ebendort ein Tundalus und eine tJbersetzung von Berlan e Josapha."
I take it that two of his bibliographical notes have been mixed up here. His statement
should read "Madrider" instead of "Toledaner" and have the additional remark: "ein
zweiter Tundalus in einer Toledaner Hs." The footnote to this statement should read:
"Roman. X, 300; Roman. Porsch. VII, 331; ZrP, IV, 318."

149

30 ' K. PlETSCH

Torre do Tombo of the same city, by Nunes, Rev. lusitana, VIII
(1903-5), 239 (A Visao de Tundalo ou 0 Cavalleiro Tungullo).

My efforts to learn something about the Sermo Domini and the
Rreglas de la yglesia de Leon para rrezar have been unsuccessful.

To return then to the MS in its present state, it begins on f. 1,
according to the wording of the first table of contents, with the Flox
sanctorum, que es libro de fueros de leyes. Folios 1-2 contain the
table of contents of the fuero of Palengia and Sevilla.

Begins: Este es el libro de las leyes, que es llamado flox sanctorum,

XI capitulos.
Ends: Titulo del p(r)esgio de los navios XCIIII

On f . 2V follows the fuero.

Begins: En el nonbre de Dios. Amen, ^f Titulo de la fe catholica.

Porque los coracones de los onbres son departidos, por ende

natural cosa es que los entendimientos dellos e las obras

non acuerden en uno.
Ends on f. 94V: E si algunos andaren en el navio que non troxieren sy non

sus cuerpos, non scan tenidos de dar nada.

The lines quoted from the fuero correspond to Fuero Real,1 6
(beginning) and 161 Ley II (end). In the printed edition a Titulo
XXV: De los rieptos concludes the work. But, according to a
footnote, this Titulo in some MSS follows Titulo XX: De las acusa-
dones e de las pesquisas. The same order may exist in our copy.
Considering further that our copy indicates ninety-four folios in
contrast with one hundred and sixty-five pages of the printed edition,
I should infer that the former is complete. It has not been used by
the editors of the printed edition.

There are a few other points upon which I should like at least to
touch. With the scant excerpts at hand, taken at a time when this
portion of the MS interested me very little, I find it impossible to go
into detail.

Aside from the form flox which will be discussed on another
occasion, to call a libro de fueros de leyes, respectively libro de las leyes,
flox sanctorum must appear strange. Now, the present text went
by several titles: Fuero real, Fuero de las leyes, Libro del Fuero, Fuero
de los concejos de Castilla, Flores. Thus Mem. hist., II, 149. To

i Opiisculos legales del Rey D. Alfonso el Sabio, publ. . . por la R. Ac. de la
Historia, II, 1836.

150

MADRID MANUSCRIPT OF SPANISH GRAIL FRAGMENTS 31

these I add from Marichalar-Manrique, Hist, de la legislation, III,
17: Fuero castellano, Fuero de Castilla, Flores de las leyes. Evidently
the careless scribe confused Flos legum and Flos sanctorum.

The title on the back of the MS reads: Leyes de Palencia. But
the statement on f. 1 and the following passage that Morel-Fatio's
more expert hand recorded: Nos Don Alfonso . . . entendiendo
que la noble cibdat de Palencia e de Sevilla no ovieron fuero, . . .
would make us believe that the present copy was destined to serve as
Fuero de Palencia e de Sevilla. The result of my search in this
direction is as follows. The Fuero Real was given by Alfonso X
to Palencia in 1256, while the king was at Segovia.1 It was given
to many other cities a list of which is found in Marichalar-Manrique,
III, 17.2 Sevilla is not among them. The fuero of this city was the
Fuero Juzgo, bestowed upon her by San Fernando in 1250.3 How
is the disagreement of those statements to be explained ?

The printed Fuero Real is divided into four books. So is the
present text, to judge from the last table of contents. But while
the first book of the printed Fuero Real has twelve titulos, our text
speaks of eleven capitulos. Perhaps the former has counted as
Titulo I a Prdlogo of the latter.

Finally, the heading : Titulo de la fe catholica is at a wrong place.

On f. 94V follows La vida de Berlan e del infante Josafa.

Begins: ^ SantC]ti spiritus adsit4 nobis gratia. Amen.

^ Aqui comienga el libro de la vida de Berlan e del rrey Josapha
de India, siervos e confesores de Dios. ^[ E de como el rrey de
India martiriava los cristianos e los monges e los hermitanos e
los segudava de su tierra. ^[ E de como se torno cristiano el rrey
Josapha, e este mismo torno cristiano despues al rrey Avenir, su
padre.

Parrofo primo: Segund cuenta Sant Johan Damageno, que fue
griego muy sancto e muy sabidor, que ovo escripto en griego esta
vida de Berlan e del rrey Josapha, en el comiengo que (que) los
monesterios se comengaron a ser fechos . . .

1 Coleccion de fueros y cartas-pueblas de Espafta, por la R. Ac. de la Historia; Catdlogo,
176.

2 A smaller list in Schirrmacher, Gesch. von Spanien, IV, 533. The latter contains
the name of Palencia that is wanting in Marichalar's list.

» Marichalar-Manrique, II, 488. According to Schirrmacher, IV, 420, it was " das
Stadtrecht von Toledo."
« MS ab sit.

151

32 ' K. PIETSCH

A few extracts may be welcome. I have chosen the Trumpet of
Doom, the Four Caskets, the Nightingale, and the Unicorn.

(f. Ill) If De lo que dixo el infante, e como rrespondio Berlan.

Quando el infante Josapha ovo dicho esto, rrespondiole Berlan muy
mansamientre e dixo: "Bien lo feziste; ca asy conviene a cosa rreal e a
senorio de rrey. Ca non paraste mientes a la mi baxeza, mas a la esperanga
de lo que asmaste que en mi yazia ascondido." H Ca sepas que fue un rrey
muy poderoso. E acaescio asy que yendo un dia en su carro muy onrrada-
mientre, como convenia a tan alto rrey, e toda la su gente, que lo guardavan,
yvan acerca del, e encontro dos onbres muy pobremientre vestidos con
vestiduras muy viles. ^f E anbos eran muy magros e avian las caras amari-
llas. E el rrey era muy sabio de todo bien e conoscio que por la aspera vida
que fazian segund este mundo eran tan magros e avyan asi amenguado |
(f. 112) lassus carnes. If E descendio el rrey del carro e tendido en tierra
estudo delante dellos e rrogoles que rrogasen por el a Dios. Despues levantose
e dioles paz de todo coragon. ^ E los rricos onbres, que yvan con el rrey, non
gelo tovieron a bien e dezian que aquello non convenia fazer a rrey. Pero non
fueron osados de gelo dezir nin de lo rreprender dello. ^f Mas dixieronlo
a un su hermano del rrey que le dixiese aquella cosa, que avya f echo escarnio
de la corona rreal. E el dixolo luego a su hermano, el rrey, que le non con-
venia fazer tal humillamiento como aquel. H E el rrey rrespondiole mansa-
mientre e dixole: "Non lo entendiste bien." E aquel rrey avia por costun-
bre que, quando el queria fazer justicia de alguno, mandava ante noche ante
su puerta de aquel taner una tronpa, que era ya deputada para aquel oficio.
E los que la oyan luego la conoscian e entendian que avya de morir aquel a
cuya puerta se taiiia. E quando vino la noche, mando llamar el rrey aquella
tronpa e mandola taner a la puerta de su hermano. ^f E quando la el oyo,
fue muy espantado e desespero de la su vida e ordeno luego todas sus cosas.
E quando1 vino en la maiiana, vestiose de vestiduras negras e fuese con su
mugier e con sus fijos a la puerta del palacio del rrey [e] estudo y llorando con
grand tristeza. E quando lo sopo el rrey, mandolo entrar. ^f E quando lo
vyo asi triste e lloroso, dixole: "Loco sin seso, e si tu temes el pregonero de
tu hermano, a quien nunca erraste, por que rreprehendes a mi, porque
salude humildosamientre los pregoneros del mi Dios, que me muestran a
mayores bozes la mi muerte cada dia e me muestran la su venida muy
espantosa, e he de dar cuenta de los mis males, que fago de cada dia?
H E tu non temas. Ca esto | <f . 112V> fiz por rreprender la tu nescedat; que
paresce que mas temes la justicia mundanal, que poco dura e ayna pasa,
que non la de Dios, que dura por sienpre. If E yo se questo non se2
levanto de tu cabega, mas yo rreprendere a los que te lo consejaron, [e] yo

1 MS quanto.
'MS le.

152

MADRID MANUSCRIPT OF SPANISH GRAIL FRAGMENTS 33

castigare la su locura." f E por esta manera enbio el rrey castigado a su
hermano.1

j* Jt jt

If De como el rrey mando fazer quatro archas de madera. En las mas
fermosas puso los huesos podridos, [e] en las mas feas las [cosas mas] presci-
adas.

Despues mando fazer el rrey quatro areas de madera. E mando que
las dos fuesen llenas de vuesos de muertos, que fedian, e mandolos cobrir
de oro e de muchas piedras presciosas e de specias e de muchas buenas
olores. If E las otras dos mando meter dentro las coronas rreales e
otras piedras presciosas e de fuera mandolas cobrir de pez e de engrudo.
If E desque fue fecho todo esto, mando llamar sus rricos onbres, que
entendia que avyan aconsejado a su hermano que lo rreprendiese del bien
que avya fecho. Tf E quando fueron en el palacio, demandoles el rrey
quales vallian mas de aquellas areas. Ellos rrespondieron que de mayor
prescio eran aquellas doradas; ca sin dubda para guardar nobles cosas fue
fecha tal obra. E estas otras negras e pegadas cosa de poca vallor devia
yazer dentro. If Dixo el rrey: "Tal es de vuestro juyzio; ca bien sabia yo
la vuestra sentencia. Ca los ojos de fuera las cosas de fuera veen, e non
conviene asy de fazer. ^ Mas conviene con los ojos del anima ver las cosas
abscondidas e spirituales, e veran los enganos de las cosas encobiertas."
If Entonge mando el rrey abrir las doradas de fuera e cobiertas de piedras
presciosas. 1f E quando fueron abiertas, sa | (f . 113) lio tan grand f edor que lo
non podian sofrir, e vieron cosa tan fea que la non podian sofrir. f Dixo el
rrey: "Esta es la seme jane, a de los que estan vestidos de nobles vestiduras
e dentro son llenos de fedor e de lixo e de peccados." Tf Despues desto mando
el rrey abrir las otras dos areas que eran cobiertas de pez e de engrudo. E
quando fueron abiertas, las cosas nobles que dentro yazian, alegraron los
corac.ones de los que las vieron. 1f Dixoles el rrey: "Estas dos areas son
a semejanga de aquellos dos onbres por que me vos fezistes rr[e]prender,
que estavan vestidos de villes panos. E vos tovistelo por escarnio judgando
la vestidura que ellos trayan vestida. E veyades las cosas de fuera e non
veyades al. 1f E yo por la su santidat echeme ante las sus caras, e yo con
los ojos de dentro acatando la santidat de las sus almas tuveme por bien-
andante e por muy enxal$ado, porque me tanxieron tan solamientre. Ca
eran de mejor merescimiento ante Dios que todas las cosas presciadas deste
mundo, que vienen ayna a fallescer." If E asi castigados e confondidos de

i The present text represents a shortened version. It is derived from the Speculum
historiale of Vincentius Bellovacensis. (So is La estoria del rey Anemur e de losaphat e de
Barlaam, published by Lauchert from a MS s. XV in Rom. Forsch., VII. But each
translation is independent of the other.)

As for literature on the Trumpet of Doom since 1893 (Kuhn), I have incidentally
noted: Lauchert, 342 ; Chauvin, III, 98; Kohler, II, 366; Gui von Cambrai, Balaham und
Josaphas, h. v. C. Appel, 41, 1355; Herbert, Romances, 1910, 385 (Speculum Laicorum);
Heuckenkamp, Die prov. Prosa- Redaction von Barlaam und Josaphat, 8, 33.

153

34 ' K. PIETSCH

sus pensamientos vanos enbio los rricos onbres el rrey de su palacio, e non
erraron contra el rrey de ally adelantre, mas pensavan las cosas, ante que
las dixiesen nin las judgasen. 1f E dixo Barlan al infante: "E tu bien
feziste; ca segund aquel rrico sabio e rrey e piadoso rrescebiste a mi por
la buena esperanga que oviste, e non te salira vana la tu esperanga, segund
yo asmo."1

f . <124V> 1f Del ballestero que era cagador e tomo el rruysenor. E de como lo
solto por los tres castigos que le dio.

Dixo Barlan: "Dizie aquel sabio que semejan los onbres que oran
los ydolos al onbre vallestero que armava a las aves. E tomo un rruysenor
e quisolo matar. H E el rruysenor dio una boz, como si fuese onbre, e dixo:
"Di tu, onbre, que provecho as de la mi muerte? Que aunque me comas,
non inchiras el tu vientre nin mataras la tu fanbre. If Mas, si me soltaredes
darte he tres castigos que, si los bien guardares, sienpre averas dellos muy
grand pro." If Quando el vallestero oyo esto, maravillose e prometiole que,
si le mostrase alguna cosa | <f . 125) nueva, que luego lo soltarie. f Dixole el
rruysenor : " Pues nunca te esfuerces a tomar ninguna cosa de las que non pue-
den ser tomadas. 1f E nunca te duelgas de la cosa perdida, si entiendes que
nunca la puedes cobrar. If E nunca creas lo que non es creedero. 1f E
guarda bien estas tres cosas, e sera bien de ti." E aquel onbre maravillose
mucho del entendimiento de las palabras e solto el rruysenor que se fuese.
1f Quando el rruysenor se vio suelto, quiso provar al onbre sy avya bien
entendido aquellas tres cosas que rresgebiese dellas algund provecho. E
comengo a bollar por el ayre encima del e dixole: "0 como fueste malacon-
sejado! Ay de ti, mesquino sin ventura, que oy perdiste tan grand thesoro!
If Ca si me tu mataras e me abrieras, e fallaras en las mis entranas piedra
preciosa que es mayor que un vuevo de estrugio." If Quando esto oyo
el cagador, fue muy triste en el su coragon, e pesole mucho, porquel avya
dexado asy yr al rruysenor. E trabajose de cabo de lo tomar, sy podiese, e
dixole: "Vente comigo para mi casa, e tenerte he muy vicioso e despues sol-
tarte he muy onrradamientre." 1f Dixo el rruysenor: "Agora creo yo
ciertamente que tu eres loco, porque creyste lo que non puede ser e non
entendiste los castigos que te yo dixe nin los guardeste para aver dellos
provecho. If Ca yo te dixe que te non dolieses de la cosa perdida, desque
sopieses que la non podries cobrar. If E dixete que non provases por tomar
la cosa que non puede ser tomada, e tu non puedes bolar por el ayre, como
yo. If Pues non | <f . 125V> ayas speranga de me tomar ; ca en un dia yre yo do tu
nunca me veas. If Otrosi dixete que non creyeses lo que non puede ser, e tu
creyste de ligero que en las mis entranas avya piedra presgiosa tamana
como vuevo de estrucio. E tu viste muy bien que todo el mi cuerpo non es

» Of. Lauchert, 343; Chauvin, III, 99; Kohler, II, 373; Gui von Cambrai, 44, 1449;
Herbert, 398 (Speculum Laicorum); Heuckenkamp, 9, 20.

154

MADRID MANUSCRIPT OF SPANISH GRAIL FRAGMENTS 35

tamano como huevo de galiina. f Pues como cupo en el tu entendimiento
que en las mis entranas avya tamana piedra ?" 1

# & j*

(f . 132V) ^[ Del onbre que yva fuyendo por miedo del unicornio e se subio
encima del arbol.2

Dixo Barlan: Un onbre yva por un camino muy trabajoso. E paro
mientes enpos de sy e vyo venir una grand bestia, que llaman unicornio, que
lo seguya por lo tomar. E el onbre comengo de fuyr, porque lo non matase.
E fallo un arbor e subiose encima del por fuyr del unicornio. E llego el
unicornio e estavalo aguardando; ca entendia que non podria mucho en el
arbor estar. E el onbre puso los pies en una pena e teniase e paro mientes
[e] vyo que tenia los pies afirmados sobre quatro cabegas de quatro culuebras.
E vyo dos mures, uno bianco e otro negro, que non quedavan de rroer la
rrayz del arbor. [E] estava plantado encima de la orilla de un pogo, e pario
mientes ayuso e vyo un grand dragon, que estava en el fondon del pozo con
la garganta abierta asperando, quando caeria. 1f E estando en esta coyta
pensava que, sy los mures oviesen acabado de rroer las rrayzes del arbol,
que el e el arbol caerian anbos en la boca del dragon. ^[ E si qualquier de
las culuebras se ensanase e se tornasse a la cueva, non avria en que afirmar
los pies e ca |(f . 133) eria en la boca del dragon, ^f E estando en este pensa-
miento paro mientes e vyo entre las rramas del arbol una colmena, [do] estavan
panares de miel. E comio dellos e con aquel poco de dulgor olvido todos los
males e los peligros en que estava. ^[ E acabaron los mures de rroer las
rrayzes del arbol, e cayeron anbos en la boca del dragon, el arbol e el onbre.
"Para mientes, infante, como es esto." ^[ El unicornio, que yva enpos del
onbre, es el diablo, que sienpre lo sygue. El arbol, en que subio el onbre>
es la vida deste mundo. Los mures, que le cortavan las rrayzes, es la noche
e el dia, que comen la vida del onbre. Las quatro coluebras, sobre quien
tenia afirmados los pies sobre sus cabegas, son los quatro humores, que man-
tienen los cuerpos de los onbres que, quando qualquier dellos se rrebuelve,
non puede ser que el onbre non yaga enfermo. H E el dragon, que yazia en
el fondon del pogo, es la muerte, que non podemos foyr. La colmena, en
que estava la miel, es un poco de deleyte, en que los onbres viven (en este
mundo) de comer e bever en este mundo. If "Pues vees, infante, quanta
es la mesquindat de los amadores del mundo e con que poca cosa engafia
a los sus amigos."3

iCf. Lauchert. 345; Grtinbaum, Jadisch-span. Chrestomathie (1896), 148;
Hartmann, Zeitsch. d. Ver. f. Volkskunde, VI (1896), 270; Chauvin. Ill, 103; IX, 30;
KOhler.I, 575, 580; Greenlaw, Publ. Mod. Lang. Assn., XXI (1906), 582; Gui von
Cambrai, 67, 2241; P. Meyer, Romania, XXXVII (1908), 217; Herbert, 209;
Heuckenkamp, 13, 1; Tyroller, Die Fdbel von dem M ann und dem Vogelinihrer Verbreitung
in der Weltliteratur, Einleit. und erster Teil, 1912.

8 In the margin: Nota exenplo.

»Cf. Lauchert, 349; Zart, Zeitach. f. d. deutschen Unterricht, XII (1898), 735; XIII.
107; Chauvin, III, 99; Gui von Cambrai, 79, 2625; Heuckenkamp, 16, 5.

155

36 f K. PIETSCH

The Vida de Berlan e Josafa ends on f. 213:

Acabase la ystoria de Berlan e de Josapha, segund que lo conto
Sant Johan Damageno, que era griego. Dios por la su misericordia
quiera a nos dar gracia e ayuda e fortaleza, porque merescamos de ser
sus hermanos e conpaneros en la gloria de Dios padre con nuestro senor
e nuestro Salvador Jesu Cristo e con el spiritu sancto, aviventador de las
almas. Amen.

Our text is of course noted in De Haan, "Barlaam and Joasaph
in Spain," Mod. Lang. Notes, X (1895), 11, 69; Men&idez y Pelayo,
Orlgenes, I (1905), XXXV, adds nothing.1 The Portuguese version
referred to by the latter and called "ine*dita todavia" was printed as
early as 1898 by G. de Vasconcellos-Abreu (A lenda dos santos
Barlaao e Josafate; I Texto crftico de um manuscrito que se le no
C6dice do Mosteiro de Alcobaga existente com o n.° 266 na T6rre de
Tombo em Lisboa).2

K. PIETSCH

UNIVERSITY OP CHICAGO

» Yet one could have expected him to say at least a word about the Libra del bien
aventurado Barlan 6 del Infante Josaffd hijo del Rey Atenir, el qual fiao sant Juan damascene,
formerly hi the Gayangos Library, now hi the National Library. Of. Catdlogo Gayangos
por P. Koca, 1904, 231, No. 672,

* Two other parts, which are to deal with the language, the origins, and the propa-
gation of the legend, are promised on the title-page, but to the best of my knowledge
have not appeared.

[To be continued]

156

CABALLO DE GINEBRA

In Cervantes' Entremes de la Gitarda Cuidadosa occurs the fol-
lowing passage:

Soldado: Pues ven aca, sota-sacristan de Satanas.

Sacristan: Pues voy alld, caballo de Ginebra.

Soldado: Bueno: sotay caballo; no falta sino el rey para tomar las manos.

In commenting upon this passage, Bonilla y San Martin,1 after
remarking that the sense of caballo de Ginebra is obscure, offers two
explanations. First, he proposes that Ginebra be emended to
Gonela. Gonnella was the court jester of the Este family, who rode
the famous horse which was "only skin and bones," alluded to in
the first chapter of Don Quijote. Second, he thinks that de Ginebra
casts an aspersion of heresy, and illustrates his point by two quota-
tions:

Tal fiesta alll se celebra,

que halla cualquier convidado

platos de came y pescado,

como en viernes de Ginebra

[Ruiz de Alarc6n, La cueva de Salamanca, II, 1].

Es como Ginebra el gusto:

sin leyes quiere vivir

[Lope de Vega, Pobreza no es vilkza, III, 11].

In the later Schevill-Bonilla edition of this play,2 the earlier
note is reprinted with the addition of another allusion to Geneva as
a nest of heresy, and also a quotation of two lines from a ballad
describing a horseback journey of Dona Ginebra. These gentlemen
therefore offer three mutually exclusive explanations: (1) Ginebra =
Gonnella; (2) Ginebra = Geneva; (3) Ginebra = Guinevere. As
for the first, an emendation should not be made if the reading in
the text can be justified, as it undoubtedly can in this instance. The
third lacks plausibility until it can be shown that Guinevere possessed
a horse famous in song and story. Cervantes twice alludes to

1 Entremeses de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, anotados por Adolfo Bonilla y San
Martin, Madrid, 1916, p. 212. The translators offer no help on this passage.

* Obras completas de Miguel de Cervantei Saavedra. Comedias y entremeses, IV
(Madrid, 1918), 206.

157 37 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, July, 1920

38 GEORGE TYLER NORTHUP

Guinevere in Don Quijote, but the passages are not relevant to our
text. Nor would it be pertinent to mention in this connection
Ariosto's heroine, Ginebra, who figures so prominently in the fifth
canto of Orlando Furioso. The second explanation is closer to the
truth, but it elucidates very little. A single meaning for the phrase
will not suffice. We are dealing with one of those equivocos, the
despair of the modern commentator, so common in Spanish writers
of the siglo de oro. Nevertheless it will not be necessary to refer the
word to different etymons.

The dictionaries give the following definitions of Ginebra: Geneva,
gin, confusion, a game of cards. Writers of the period offer examples
of Ginebra used in all these senses.

Spaniards of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries viewed
Calvin's capital with holy abhorrence. Their feeling toward Geneva
resembled our present attitude toward Moscow. Geneva was the
center of revolutionary heresy triumphant. It was a city sin ley
in the double sense of " without law" and " without religion."
Its reputation as a center of disorder was gained long before the
advent of Calvin. Under Calvin, Geneva was undoubtedly more
orderly than it had been under previous regimes; but from the
Spanish point of view there could be nothing lawful or praiseworthy
in the rule of one who defied the pope. Thus, Velez de Guevara's
Limping Devil, on mischief bent, visits the two towns of Bertolina
and Geneva and finds no work to do, "because their inhabitants are
of themselves devils" (El Diablo Cojuelo, Tranco V). The following
passage shows how Geneva typified to the Spanish mind a com-
bination of heresy and confusion:

Los Dos:
El Amor y los Celos

partamos e*sta,
pues son celos y amores

una Ginebra.
Vallejo:
Es verdad que les toca,

pues se parecen
en las confusiones
y en los herejes

[Quinones de Benavente, Baile de la casa de Amor1].

1 Coleccidn de entremeaes, loas, bailee, jdcaras y mojigangas, ordenada par Don Emilio
Cotarelo y Mori, II (Madrid, 1911), 475.

158

CABALLO DE GINEBRA 39

This being the feeling with regard to Geneva, the phrase de
Ginebra readily became an abusive epithet (apodo) :

Pedrosa: Sacristan de Ginebra, poco a poco

[Quinones de Benavente, Entremes famoso de la Antojadiza]1

The phrase undoubtedly carried with it an implication of heresy,
as Bonilla thinks. It would be doubly insulting when applied to a
churchman. While it may be rash to conclude from a single instance
that it was an epithet commonly bestowed upon the much-despised
sexton, if that be the case, no small part of the humor in the passage
under examination lies in the fact that a sexton applies to a soldier
an epithet more commonly given to his own class.

But Geneva also means "gin" in both English and Spanish;
de Ginebra, therefore, meant not merely "heretical" but "drunken."
In his well-known Loa del Caballero del Milagro, Agustin de Rojas
Villandrando says:

Mas sobre todo, senora,
cautiya el alma en Ginebra,

[i.e., while I was intoxicated]
vine a dar, por mi desdicha,
en las manos de una vieja.2

And the same author writes, in his Loa del cautiverio de la Rochela:
Y un sacerdote de Baco,
can6nigo de Ginebra,
le ensenaba el Gamant ave

[can this be Comment avezf]
por amor a la jaqueca.3

Quinones de Benavente, too, tells of a drunken doctor who was a

graduate of Geneva:

Doctor:

i Ah, senores, el tiempo esta borracho!
Si no lo han por enojo, soy Juan Cacho,
que ya tanto el favor se disimula
que puede ser doctor cualquiera mula.
A este lugar insigne hoy he llegado,
que por Ginebra he sido graduado . . . .4

The phrase caballo de Ginebra, then, has the double meanings,
"heretical horse" and "drunken horse," but the possibilities

i Ibid., II, 808. » Ibid., I. 380.

s Ibid., I, 345. « Ibid., II, 708.

159

40 GEORGE TYLER NORTHUP

contained in Cervantes' pun are far from exhausted. There is an evi-
dent allusion to card play. Sola, of course, means "knave, " and the
caballo or mounted horseman is the face-card next higher, corre-
sponding in value to our queen. To the Soldier's "Come here,"
the Sacristan replies: "I am going there"; to the Soldier's de
Satands, he retorts with the name of a place presumably worse than
Satan's abode; and with the sola in sota-sacristan (under-sacristan)
he matches another face-card in the pack. To still further complicate
matters, sota had the meaning "prostitute," and caballo likewise had
its obscene connotation. Quevedo in his Confesion de los mantos,
contrasts sota and caballo as follows:

A quien amago con sota,

doy coces con un caballo;

copas doy a los valientes,

y espadas a los borrachos.1

The allusions to card-play are here self-evident, and Duran sees also
an obscene meaning in the passage. It is not necessary to suppose
that Cervantes is guilty of obscenity in the passage under discussion,
but such may possibly be the case.

If we ask ourselves which of the four caballos is meant by caballo

de Ginebra, it would seem probable that it signified caballo de copas.

From early times the suit called copas, "goblets," had been held to

symbolize drunkenness. We find this already in Sanchez de Badajoz :

Los oros, bastos y espadas,

y copas, cuatro metales,

son las insignias notadas

que trae Lucifer pintadas

per banderas infernales.
Oros para codiciar,

espadas para renir,

copas para embriagar,

bastos para caminar

al hospital a pedir: [Matraca de jugadores*].

In Cervantes' century, card-players were accustomed to invent
humorous designations for the various face-cards of the deck. For
example, the different solas were named after prominent local

1 Duran, Romancero General, II (Madrid, 1912), 532a, and note.

* Recopilacitn en metro del bachiller Diego Sdnchez de Badajoz, edited toy V. Bar rante
y Moreno, Madrid, 1882, p. 33.

160

CABALLO DE GINEBRA 41

prostitutes.1 These names would vary according to time and place.
It is not unlikely, therefore, that the caballo de copas, the suit which
was identified in Spaniards' minds with drunkenness, was sometimes
called the "Genevan horse," or "gin horse." But if this was so,
why should the name of a playing-card be applied to an individual
as an insult? Nothing was commoner than this procedure. Just
as the names of individuals were bestowed upon playing-cards, so
the names of playing-cards were given to individuals as abusive
epithets. I need only mention that in the Entremes de los apodos,
that rich collection of terms of abuse, an old doctor is called "king
of clubs, " and a young man "knave of spades. "

The above is offered merely as a hypothesis. It is difficult to
recover the slang of another age and easy to see more in a phrase like
this than it really contained. We must not forget that there existed
also a game named Ginebra. I know nothing about this game and
the function which the caballo played in it. It is doubtful whether
there is any allusion to it in the passage in La Guarda cuidadosa.
Monreal, Rodriguez Marin, and Hazanas de la Rtia, who have
written so extensively on la ciencia de Vilhdn, do not mention the
game Ginebra, but the following passage would seem to indicate that,
like Geneva the city, it was characterized by confusion:
Pues que toda vuestra vida

es como juego de naipes,

donde todas son figuras,

y el mejor, mejor lo hace;

dejemos a cada uno

viva en la ley que gustare,

aunque su vida juzguemos

a Ginebra semejante

[Entremes del hospital de los podridos2].

Notice that the anonymous author of El hospital de los podridos
couples the word Ginebra with an allusion to playing-cards, just as
Cervantes does in La Guarda cuidadosa. Those who would attribute
the first of these two farces to Cervantes are welcome to this mite of
evidence.

GEORGE TYLER NORTHUP

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

* Hazanas de la Rfia, Los rufianes de Cervantes, Seville, 1906, p. 43.

* Cotarelo, op. cit., I, 98.

161

REVIEWS AND NOTICES

Rousseau and Romanticism. By IRVING BABBITT. Boston: Hough-
ton, Mifflin, 1919. Pp. xxiii+419.

This volume deals less with Rousseau than with the whole morale of
romanticism and less with romanticism proper than with modern literature
at large. It is the most thoroughgoing and penetrating attack yet made in
this country upon the tendencies of the last two centuries. This will appear
if we survey briefly Professor Babbitt's philosophy, his ethics, his views
of history, literature, and art.

In philosophy, the author stands for dualism as opposed to the monistic
view, for humanism as opposed to naturalism, and prefers the "inward
working" of the spirit to the doubtful gains of modern progress. He is an
absolute classicist, whose god is Aristotle. He believes in measure, restraint,
probability, and decorum, and the greatest of these is decorum. He follows
Aristotle's definition of "two laws for man: an ordinary or natural self of
impulse and desire and a human self, " identified with the "power of control. "
(It will be observed that the first "self" is likely to be creative, the second
critical.) The too free development of the natural self ("law for thing"),
from Diderot to Ibsen and beyond, is made responsible for most of the
world's woes. More than ever now are needed the restraints imposed by
"the truths of humanism and religion": on the one hand, proportion and
decorum, on the other, humility. A traditionalist, Professor Babbitt will
base his creed on all ancient and " secular experience. " From such a founda-
tion he will rise to a "sound" rather than a "Promethean" individualism.

Now the two great traditions, Christian and humanistic, have "always"
held to some form of dualism; but Rousseauism, because it affirms natural
(primitive) goodness, is a "virtual denial of the struggle between good and
evil in the breast of the individual." This is the naturalism which finds its
antinomy in the humanism of Professor Babbitt; a humanism which rejects
the "law for thing"; which suspects much of science, material progress, and
the spirit of service; a humanism which is not humanitarian, which trusts
more in humility than in humanity. The critic pays his compliments to
Christianity, for any discipline is welcome, but the classical tradition is
what he chiefly urges.

The humanist, then, desires to be "moderate and sensible and decent" —
adjectives that do not occur to one while contemplating sunsets. His ideal
is ethical self-culture, proceeding from a kind of "inner work and the habits
162] 42

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 43

that result. " This labor must be imitative, requiring a center and a model.
It should be accomplished without vivid enthusiasm (pas de zele, as the
bishop said), though conversion and salvation are both attainable by
the true humanist. He desires an ethical not a material efficiency, and the
solution of working outwardly, as Goethe once proposed, is a "sham solution. "
But " to work according to the human law is simply to rein in one's impulses, "
the chief of which are elsewhere identified with the three churchly lusts for
knowledge, sensation, and power. The libido that constraineth us must in
turn be constrained.

This is a negative rather than a constructive program. It cautions us to
lash down our feelings, passions, and imagination — which are conceded to be
the driving forces of humanity — but it gives us very little idea of how to
direct such forces to any creative end. In its utter safety, this may be a
suitable philosophy for sheltered academes, but how can one attain to
anything in literature or life by trusting to such maxims as these? — "The
veto power" is the "weightiest fact with which man has to reckon." "A
great civilization is .... a great convention." "Human breadth"
is achieved "by taking on limitations."

This negativity granted, the present writer has no necessary quarrel
with Professor Babbitt's attack on various features of the naturalistic creed.
That is mainly a matter of personal belief and temperament, in spite of
Professor Babbitt's distrust of temperament. And if one really believes
that "modern philosophy is bankrupt from Descartes down" and that
modern literature consists of an "incomparable series of false prophets,"
one has surely the right to say so. The latter-day combination of Baconian
(scientific) utilitarianism and of Rousseauistic sentimentalism is viewed as
all-pervasive and peculiarly dangerous. "The Greek humanizes nature;
the Rousseauist naturalizes man. " And naturalism implies endless change,
a medley of values, a humanly purposeless science, the final triumph of
machinery and force. There is truth in this, if mankind is essentially
spiritual and ultimately one spirit.

At any rate, Professor Babbitt legitimately prefers Aristotelian univer-
sality and wholeness, the service of Platonic insight, the search for abiding
central truth, the supremacy of the analytical reason in determining this;
he urges the suppression of the separatist ego and the union of spirits upon
some vaguely indicated "higher levels." What are these? Not the more
inspiring human ideals, since a single-minded devotion to them is condemned
in set terms. "Those who have sought to set up a cult of love or beauty or
science or humanity or country are open to the same objections as the
votaries of nature." None of them "can properly be put in the supreme
central place," because none of them involves sufficient discipline. The
detailed indictment of these five or six major ideals is surely too absolute.
What can be put in the supreme central place ? Man's best effort is bound
within the circles indicated, together with a few more, but there is no

163

44 REvfews AND NOTICES

necessary hierarchy in this arrangement: they are intersecting not concentric
circles. Yet it is not by slighting their importance that one can attain to
the "rounded development" of the "complete positivist."

Although Professor Babbitt pays his tribute to the spiritual force of
Christianity, the morality which he sets forth is rather that of the Old Testa-
ment than that of the gospels. "Thou shalt not" is more favored than
"thou shalt." The frein vital is more praiseworthy than the Everlasting
Yea. "All other evils in life may be reduced to the failure to check that
something in man which is reaching out for more. " The hunger of Oliver
Twist would find no justification in this opponent of anything expansive.
Buddhism is approved because it means "negatively the extinction of the
expansive desires; positively, increase in peace, poise, centrality" (which
have also a negative aspect). Both Buddhism and Christianity accept the
burden of "moral responsibility," which the naturalist, in his "ethical
passivity," seeks to evade.

It is true that the naturalist is not primarily seeking for burdens; he is
after his kind of happiness, for Professor Babbitt concedes that "all men aim
at happiness." But apparently all men should reach this goal along a set
path, according to fixed standards, which imply an element of oneness.
More acceptable is the insistence on ethical experience and guides, on ethical
purpose and conscience in life and work. Yet even these principles are
stated mainly as inhibitions and the romanticists are ruled out of the fold
with the severity of a Minos. "There is no such thing as romantic morality. "
The philosophy of the beautiful soul is sneered at, for the belle dme is often
full of delinquencies in practice. The romantic ideal was altruism, their
"real" was egoism, and both "isms" are offensive to this critic. Straining
beyond normal experience, the romanticist finds his happiness only in dream-
land or nympholepsy and the resultant is a wide-spread melancholy, "the
greatest literature of despair the world has ever seen. " It might be answered
that not all romanticists are desperate (Lamartine, Shelley, G. Sand), and
not all desperate people are romanticists. But the real crime of these
writers was their expansive individualism: "the general sense should never
be sacrified lightly, " and tabu is worthier than temperament. Also Rousseau
turns virtue into a passion and conscience into a mere expansive virtue.
This was originally the fault of the English Deists.

"The first place," Professor Babbitt sturdily declares, "always belongs
to action and purpose" and ". ... the problem of conduct remains."
The problem is condensed in the supreme maxim, "By their fruits ye shall
know them." Now, according to Maigron, Rousseauistic living produces
bad fruits: therefore Professor Babbitt condemns romanticism. But the
"orchard test" should in all fairness be applied to other products than to
light life in the Quarter, suicide in a garret or Musset's affair with George

164

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 45

Sand. The fruits of romanticism are properly literature, not conduct.
Romantic poetry is a fruit that the world has justly found seasonable and
palatable. But Professor Babbitt objects to idling and to a "dalliant
imagination," even when they reprehensively result in very fine poetry;
"it is not easy to be more poetical than Keats," and yet Keats is classed as
merely "recreative" and sensuous.

With these views it is not surprising that Professor Babbitt rejects Art
for Art's sake. "Beauty loses most of its meaning when divorced from
ethics." Art must have the quality of high-seriousness, though without
direct didacticism. True drama, for instance, "requires a scale of ethical
values. " The romanticists have confused all values, especially the ethical.
In love, they have confused flesh and spirit (which is "human" enough).
In nature-worship, they have confused morality and pantheism in a "sham
spirituality." Lowell, Browning, and Wordsworth have left us with the
idea "that to go out and mix oneself up with the landscape is the same as
doing one's duty"; whereas, to the classically minded, the landscape and
nature-poetry are either recreative or all wrong. Again, "the romantic
moralist tends to favor expansion on the ground that it is vital, creative,
infinite" (amen!); and finally, "the underlying assumption of romantic
morality is that the virtues that imply self-control count as nought compared
with brotherhood and self-sacrifice. " These two admissions, duly weighed,
probably say as much for romantic morality as one would wish to say.

Ill

Except in the matter of definition and as regards the origins of the move-
ment, Professor Babbitt does not aim primarily at a historical treatment of
romanticism. His point of view is rather philosophical and he is mainly
occupied with analyzing and illustrating that type of romanticism which he
styles "emotional naturalism." It would not then be fair to expect a com-
plete history of the movement, with differentiation of its various phases and
shades. Yet some historical errors seem implicit (1) in a view of modern
history which almost wholly condemns the writers of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries; (2) in a one-sided estimate of many great men; (3) in
overemphasizing the spread of Rousseauistic romanticism, without due
regard to the varieties represented by other writers. Let us consider first
Professor Babbitt's view of history.

We learn that as early as the Church Fathers, "human nature had gone
bankrupt; and for some time it needed to be administered in receivership."
The Renaissance, acceptable in so far as it fostered a true classicism, is less
laudable in its "revival of the pagan and naturalistic side of antiquity"
and also in its "strong tendency towards individualism." The French
classical age, fortunately, moved toward a general or common sense (in
either sense) and distrusted individualism and imagination. It is due to
Professor Babbitt to say that elsewhere he appreciates the quality of the

165

46 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

classical imagination as found in Racine. But in this volume he rather
impairs his argument by failing to stress the virtues of the various

French classicists — he prefers the Greek In the meantime, what

was happening across the channel ? There is no scamping of the merits of
the age of Shakespeare. Professor Babbitt not only admires "Elizabethan
inspiration," but speaks warmly and somewhat inconsistently of that
"great creative literature, in which the freedom and spontaneity of the
imagination had not been cramped by a too strict imitation of models."
But, from now on, nil admirari is his motto.

The chief objection to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment is that
it "did not have enough light." The main currents of that century
are correctly stated as pseudo-classic formalism, excessive Cartesian rational-
ism, and the new empiricism, proceeding from Bacon and Locke. This
empiricism is "naturalistic," and so is emotional deism, with its effusiveness.
These several tendencies are viewed askance and Professor Babbitt, justly
enough, sees neo-classic formalism as the real spring-board for romanticism.
It could hardly be expected that he would appreciate the humanitarian and
liberalizing features of la philosophic or of the Revolution.

The nineteenth century is full of sophistries. It is likely to prove
"the most wonderful and the least wise" of centuries. It contains a "prodi-
gious peripheral richness and a great central void, " in which echo hollowly
the voices of sham prophets. It encouraged various false "attempts at
communion" (see "five major ideals" above), which appeal only to the
half -educated. Also — horresco refer ens — it nurtured the monster Romanti-
cism (see section IV, below), a pot-pourri of false ideals, "a movement that
from Rousseau to Bergson has sought to discredit the analytical intellect. "
As for the rest of the century, Professor Babbitt readily accepts the theory
that makes realism the reactionary continuation of romanticism — "romanti-
cism on all fours. " Is that definition applicable to Leconte de Lisle, Dumas
fils, and Thomas Hardy ? Professor Babbitt considers both forms (extreme
unreal and extreme real) as different aspects of naturalism, a common impulse
to get away from decorum. Applicable to Zola, this view tells us very little
about Balzac. As for the contemporary scientific movement, that appar-
ently manifests itself mainly in the "dehumanizing of man." Carry on a
little farther and we get still another "bankruptcy" in Pragmatism, other
vicious offspring of I' art pour I' art in the "maniacs of expression of the
twentieth century." However, one can only assent to the view that the
Germans have been the chief masters of soulless science and that our "anar-
chical age" finds its crowning stupidity in the Great War. It seems less
clear that civilization is menaced by the "present alliance between emotional
naturalists and utilitarians" and it seems quite exaggerated to declare that
if Rousseau's philosophy is unsound, therefore "it follows that the total
tendency of the Occident at present is away from civilization." C'est la
faute a Rousseau, as Gavroche said.

166

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 47

When it comes to individuals, Professor Babbitt warns us that from
partial passages, "the reader will perhaps be led to infer a total condemnation
of the authors so quoted"; the effect indeed is usually that of a total con-
demnation, because of the vehemence of the critic's prejudices. His judg-
ments, from the ethical standpoint, are frequently wise and salutary. But
he seems to have no other standpoint. Appreciation of poetry, as such, is
at a discount, and those writers whose legacy is not primarily a moral message
are often viewed through a glass darkly. A number of examples will make
this plain. Among the great names, Aristotle, Buddha, and Confucius are
valued for their practical ethics, Shakespeare and Cervantes mainly for
their " centrality, " Homer for his imitative objectivity. There are also
tributes to the Socratic method, to Sophocles, Milton, and Dante. Goethe
is praised for his final serenity, Pascal for his esprit de finesse and Dr. Johnson
for his " ethical realism." This practically exhausts the list of Professor
Babbitt's admirations. He criticizes specifically Moliere as too worldly,
Voltaire as too light, Pope as "inadequate," Diderot as naturalistic. The
Cartesians are marked by a "dogmatic and arrogant rationalism" and the
Kantians reveal a "central impotence." Whatever is romantic is wrong:
Balzac (?), Schiller, Chateaubriand, Schlegel. As for Hugo, he lacks
common sense and ethical insight and he is grossly melodramatic. Shelley's
Prometheus is melodrama of another kind and this poet is a perfect example
of the nympholept. Even Wordsworth and Browning are not spared.
The former is granted some ethical elevation, but he is thoroughly wrong
about nature and her teachings, as well as about childhood and the language
of poetry. Browning is meant for the half-educated, and the critic rather
disagreeably sneers at the Summum Bonum, the idea that supreme happiness
may be found "in the kiss of one girl"; Browning represents a "hybrid art"
and other verses of his are called the "most flaccid spiritually in the English
language." Among contemporary thinkers, Bergson's "monstrous sophis-
tries" are scored, W. James is "wildly romantic," and these two, together
with Professor Dewey, are suffering from naturalistic intoxication. One
might go on and list the "delusions" and disillusions of Vigny, Flaubert, and
G. Sand, but the censorious bias is already evident.

Rousseau, perhaps more warrantably, bears the brunt of these attacks
because Rousseau does set up principally as an ethical teacher. The main
doubt that suggests itself here is historical. It may be admissible to hold
that "Rousseau represents more fully than any other one person a great
international movement. " Even so, it is questionable whether the roman-
ticism of Hugo and Shelley, of Schiller and Wordsworth, is primarily a
Rousseauistic and emotional romanticism. The individualism which is
at the core of the movement tended to wide differentiations in romantic
writers of various countries. Jean-Jacques himself is reprehended, philo-
sophically and morally, because of his lack of deep reflection, his primitivism
and nature-worship, his failure to divide sense and spirit, emotion and

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48 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

virtue. Ethically, it is quite possible to differ from Rousseau. But again
Professor Babbitt fails to point out the literary values of his sensibility, his
imagination, his "impassioned recollection" and his impassioned prose.
Rousseau is viewed as the "arch-sentimentalist," spiritually a sham, impris-
oned by his ego, insisting on his uniqueness, standing for wonder, spontaneity
and savage ignorance, unadjusted, self-indulgent and dalliant, a father of
false gospels. The genuine power and feeling of his writings is not noticed.
What is emphasized is the "audacity of revolt in the name of feeling from
both humility and decorum." Are these recurrent virtues necessarily
superior to feeling ? The rigid humanistic attitude is again indicated in this
extract: "It is easier to be a genius on Rousseauistic lines than to be a man
on the terms imposed by the classicist. " It is surely safer — but is it easier ?

We are now ready to examine Professor Babbitt's conception of aesthet-
ics, as well as his understanding of romantic versus classical art and literature
in the abstract. I do not find that he has any theory of aesthetics per se.
It is styled a "nightmare subject." The term implies an effort "to rest
beauty upon feeling," which is an ever-shifting basis. Beauty itself "loses
most of its meaning when divorced from ethics," and the pursuit of mere
beauty is the "pursuit of illusion. " Yet the author grants the necessity of
illusion whether in life or art. The best classicist "perceives his reality only
through a veil of illusion, " the right use of which is not to project the imagi-
nation toward an endless torrent of change, but rather toward the abiding
"element of oneness" which remains central in the flux. The worship of
art, however, as professed by Flaubert, is a sham religion and George Sand's
manifesto contains much more truth. Rien n'est beau que le vrai — yet
Keats's attempt to link the two, Professor Babbitt wittily observes, was
disproved as long ago as the Trojan War. So in the case of Helen, the
Greeks seem to have fought for beauty on its own merits. Still we learn
that "ethical beauty in the Greeks resides [mainly] in order and proportion;
[it is] not a thing apart. " A chief modern source of aesthetic confusion was
Shaftesbury, with his "inclination to identify the good and the beautiful."
Rousseau develops this aesthetic morality.

The effort here is inconsistent: Professor Babbitt's argument tends
partly to submerge the beautiful (without estranging it) beneath the ethical
and the true; partly to displace and disjoin beauty from truth and goodness,
thereby allowing a possibly separate existence. The latter tendency is
seen also in the admission that rich poetical effects may be gained from
reverie and association with nature, activities which are rather amoral.
This does not mean that one should acclaim or rejoice in poetry. For
Professor Babbitt, "the light that never was on sea or land," is Arcadian
spoofing, and "the desire of the moth for the star" is dismissed as mere
nympholepsy.

168

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 49

The partial definition of romanticism from which the critic works is as
follows: "a thing is romantic when it is wonderful rather than probable
.... , when it is strange, unexpected, intense, superlative, extreme, unique."
The definition has reference rather to the dawn of romanticism than to its
more conscious literary expression. We learn that "the uncultivated
human imagination is romantic" and "incurably melodramatic." We
learn further that "all children, nearly all women and the vast majority of
men always have been, are and probably always will be romantic. " Is not
this an admission that the romantic is an inherent part of human nature ?
Professor Babbitt speaks also of man's "primary demand for some haven of
refuge," his "ineradicable longing" for some Arcadian escape, his craving
for endless vistas and for a "view of life to which the perception lends
immediacy and the imagination infinitude." What the writer does not
indicate is that this longing may have a spiritual source and become a
spiritual adventure. The idealism of Lamartine, the honor of "Lord Jim,"
Musset's cry, "Malgre" moil'infini me tourmente," the spirit of Stevenson and
of Cyrano, Kipling's "True Romance," these and such as these are not
mentioned. But Rousseauistic romanticism is again scored for its freakish-
ness, its preoccupation with its own uniqueness, the fact that it "tramples
verbal decorum under foot," its eccentricity and unreality, its feminine
feeling for magic and glamor. "Nothing is in itself romantic; it is only
imagining that makes it so" (cf. Shakespeare). And thus we pursue the
wrong kind of illusion. In Chateaubriand's romanticism, for instance,
the conspicuous elements are these: "Arcadian longing, the pursuit of the
dream-woman, the aspiration towards the infinite .... with the cult of
nature." For in the despotism of mood to which the romanticist submits,
he will "tend to make of nature the plaything of his mood." Not only
is nature a refuge but an ideal setting for la solitude a deux. Romantic love
is fatally linked with emotional intoxication (and "thrills" are always objects
of suspicion), with "infinite indeterminate desire," and particularly with
the moi of the poet. "The more Titan and Titaness try to meet, the more
each is driven back into the solitude of his own ego." So Musset is the
"chief martyr of this mortal chimera, " the delusion that passionate romantic
love can truly exalt and ennoble. Even Perdican's immortal plea is turned
against him! Finally, the "sense of uniqueness in feeling passes over into
that of uniqueness in suffering" — and romantic melancholy is enthroned.
A chief objection to the whole movement, of course, is its "evasion of moral
responsibility and setting up of scapegoats" (e.g., fatality).

This indictment, together with the numerous passages cited in other
connections, leaves little doubt as to Professor Babbitt's prejudice. It
must be added that he makes a few concessions, allowing the romanticists
certain poetic gifts and their share of soul and imagination. We pass to
the author's own ideal, which is classicism. He had already spoken of the
romantic debdcle as due in part to the difficulty of uniting "men who are

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50 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

indulging each to the utmost his own 'genius' or idiosyncrasy." Desiring
brotherhood or sympathy, they attain only solitude. But "great literature"
is rather defined as the "interpretation of an infinite that is accessible to
those who possess in some degree the same type of imagination. " On this
basis of the greatest common denominator Professor Babbitt would con-
struct the positive side of his humanistic program, all compact of what is
normal and central, disciplined and decorous. The "mediatory virtues"
may be summed up in the Greek conception of decorum, which means
simply the preservation of smoothness and temperance amid the storms of
passion. Ethical art has such restraint and calm; and its " only rule . . . .
is to view life with some degree of imaginative wholeness. " Experience and
imagination together will give us a Greek universality, a "knowledge of the
abiding human element." And taste mediates between what is unique
creatively and what is representative humanly. Such are the classical
qualities; now here is the "heart of the classical message: one should aim
first of all not to be original but to be human, and to be human one needs to
look up to a sound model and to imitate it. " (To whom did the first sound
model look up? If eighteenth-century neo-classical " looking up" had
continued indefinitely, could posterity ever cease looking down ?) Anyhow,
"the [resulting] imposition of form and proportion is .... culture."
And genuine culture is difficult, disciplinary, opposed to Rousseauistic
spontaneity.

This is the central debate between the schools: the romanticist declares
you cannot "submit to the yoke of either reason or imitation and at the same
time be imaginative"; the classicist grants the supremacy of the creative
imagination, "but adds that to imitate rightly is to make the highest use
of the imagination." Is it still a question of imitating books or of true
Aristotelian mimesis? Another hazy point is the definitionof "insight."
We are perpetually hearing that classicism rests on an "immediate
insight into the universal," that the classicist apprehends intuitively "the
total symmetry of life. " Without venturing to deny this wonderful power,
we should like to learn more about its nature and processes. If it functions
absolutely and beyond our ken, it would seem to have some kinship with
the romantic conception of genius.

Professor Babbitt's chapter on romantic genius, naturally, is inadequate,
and one is not content with the chapter on romantic love. The most forceful
chapters are those concerning romantic morality and "The Present Outlook. "
"Romantic Irony" would be thin, were it not thickened out by the insertion
of various other matters. Occasionally the treatment, without losing its
semblance of logic and its "powerful dialectic," tends to become scrappy
and "peripheral. " So there are many returns to the motif and many repeti-
tions. But on the whole the method and the style are of a high order,

170

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 51

needing no commendation from the reviewer and no recommendation to all
who know Professor Babbitt's former volume on the Masters of Modern
French Criticism. It is only the content of Rousseau and Romanticism
which seems in some respects "perilous stuff," largely because the author
will close his ears to the sirens' song, whether they sing of poetry and creation,
or of landscapes and love. Stevenson once said that there were two prin-
cipal kinds of truth, a truth for the old and a truth for the young; perhaps
classicism is the better truth for critics and romanticism for those creatively
inclined. Nature, magna rerum parens, includes every ism, together with
critics and poets.

Finally it should be said that Professor Babbitt, in the course of his long
argument, has uttered many wise and fair judgments. One is bound to
accept much that he says about the dangers of Rousseauistic living. If the
questionable judgments appear more salient in this review, that is because
the author's constant habit of attack seemed to call for a serried system of
defense. Curiously enough, his own statements, by reason of their thorough-
going quality, have often supplied or implied the counter-irritant. A few
more examples of this, partaking of the de te fabula variety, may be offered
by way of valediction. "One can discern .... the danger of a classicism

that is too aloof from the here and now " "He was not capable

of a poetic faith, not willing to suspend his disbelief on passing from the
world of ordinary fact to the world of artistic creation." "Tradition and
routine will be met sooner or later by the cry of Faust: Hinaus ins Freie."

E. PRESTON DARGAN
UNIVERSITY OP CHICAGO

Franzosische Dichter des Mittelalters: II. Marie de France. By EMIL
WINKLEB. Sitzungsberichte der kaiserlichen Academic der Wis-
senschaften in Wien. Philosophisch-historische Klasse. 188. Band,
3. Abhandlung. Wien, 1918. Pp. 127.

In this elaborate treatise, Emil Winkler has attempted to identify Marie
de France with the Countess Marie de Champagne (1145-98). The thesis
attracts by its dramatic interest: these two women stand out in high relief
among twelfth-century personalities. The first ranks among the most
talented of the Old French poets; the second was a leader in society and a
patroness who surrounded herself with a remarkable group of writers.

In support of Winkler's contention it may be said that both Maries
were of noble birth; both were interested in love-literature, one as an author
(the Lais), the other as a patroness; both turned their attention, toward
the end of their lives, to pious works (the Espurgatoire Saint Patriz; Evrart's
translation of Genesis; the Eructavit) ; and both lived in the second half of
the twelfth century. Winkler makes use of these generally accepted facts,
but he has discovered no additional evidence.

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52 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

He has attempted to show that the love treatment in Marie's Lais is in
conformity with the views ascribed to Marie de Champagne by Andreas
Capellanus in his De amore. But Marie de Champagne seems to have
enjoyed detailed discussions of love questions, whereas the love treatment
in the Lais is naive : it shows no trace of a precieux environment such as the
Countess of Champagne created.

Winkler seems to realize the weakness of his positive argument and
therefore his chief effort is to combat the opposing views generally held by
scholars in regard to Marie de France: that she was born in the Vexin, in
the extreme west of the Isle de France, and that she lived and wrote in
England, whereas it is certain that Marie de Champagne was born in Paris
and lived in Champagne from the age of eighteen until her death.

Marie's statement si sui de France (Fables, Epilogue, 1. 4) is taken
to imply that she was living outside of France; there are certain
Anglo-Norman traits in her language; she gives some description of Pistre,
a small town in the Norman Vexin (Dous amanz, vss. 18 ff.), accurate enough
to imply familiarity with the place; two pieces of internal evidence were
advanced by Mah1 to indicate that Marie was living in England when she
wrote the Espurgatoire Saint Patriz; Be*dier interpreted the expression
terres de Id (Milun, 330) as implying that Marie was living in England when
she wrote this Lai; several English words are used in the Lais and the
Fables; Marie states that she translated the Fables from an English original
(Marie de Champagne could hardly be expected to know English) ; finally,
the best manuscripts of all the works of Marie de France that we have were
copied in England: these are the well-known arguments advanced by scholars
in the past.

Winkler attacks these arguments in order, except that he neglects the
evidence afforded by the description of Pistre. But he is able to refute
satisfactorily only those of Mall. He declares that Marie de France was
born and lived in the heart of France because of her own statement, si sui
de France; he believes that the poet is using her title as the daughter of the
king of France. But it may be objected that a title would not be divided
in this way: Marie ai nom, si sui de France; it is also improbable that a
person writing in France would make this unnecessary statement.

Winkler states that Warnke's investigation of Marie's language leaves
no doubt that she wrote in the dialect of the Isle de France. At this point
he appears to move a little too swiftly: let us look more closely at the evi-
dence obtainable. This evidence is not all to be found in Winkler's pages.
Warlike himself is much less sure of the conclusion to be deduced from his
study of Marie's language (Fables, Bibliotheca normannica, VI, Ixxx ff.
summary on p. cxi). Warnke concludes that it is very hard to determine
what dialect she used; but, in agreement with Suchier (Altfrz. Gram., §19),
he inclines to consider Francien her native speech on account of her use of
the diphthong <m<Latin o. In addition he cites as evidence her use of the

172

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 53

rhyme ueil<(ocvlu : sofei7<soliculu (Espurgatoire, 1822). Nyrop does not
admit the diphthong ou<5 (Grammaire historique, I3, §183) in Old French;
moreover, T. A. Jenkins (Espurgatoire Saint Patriz [1894], pp. 22-28) has
shown that Marie does not have qu(o. In his second edition (Decennial
Publications of the University of Chicago, 1903) in a note to line 1882, where
ueil is in rhyme with soleil, Professor Jenkins refers to Suchier's argument
based on this rhyme as unsound because the same rhyme is used by Angier
(Vie de Saint Gregoire) who is known to have written in England. But, on
the other hand, Warnke brings forward some strong indications of Anglo-
Norman traits. Marie, moreover, separates the imperfect of the first
conjugation from that of the second and third; ei has not developed to oi;
anc is kept separate from enc.

Suchier and, following him, Warnke assigned Marie's birthplace to the
Vexin, in the west of the Isle de France. Winkler cannot allow the matter
to rest in this situation; he therefore affirms his belief that Marie wrote in
the literary language of the time, referring to Suchier in Warnke's Lais2,
Vorbemerkung, to Groeber, Grundriss, I2, 727, and especially to Gertrud
Wacker's recent essay, Ueber das Verhaeltnis von Dialekt und Schriftsprache
im Altfranzoesischen, 1916. If such is the case, her language would not
help in determining her birthplace. This may be true; but her language
may very well indicate where she lived during a large part of her life, and it
may offer excellent evidence in this regard, especially if it is corroborated by
other facts.

Next Winkler takes up Mall's evidence. He quite correctly discards
the allusion to King Stephen because the name already stood in the Latin
prose of Henry of Saltrey, which Marie translated. Line 1992 of the
Espurgatoire states that certain monks

Vindrent a Lue en Engleterre.

This line translates the Latin "ad Ludense coenobium .... in Angliam
redierunt." In the first edition a Lue was printed as one word : alue. Mall
translated: "The monks came hither to England," and thought the author
had thus shown that she was living in England. Winkler prefers to
translate alue as "at once," unaware apparently that he is fighting a phan-
tom, for the word is simply the name of the abbey of Louth Park, as was
discovered long ago by Warnke (Literaturblatt fur germ. u. rom. Phil.
[1895], col. 87).

Winkler disagrees with Be"dier (Revue des deux Mondes, CVII, 841,
note) in regard to the interpretation of line 330 of Milun:
De tutes les terres de la

To Be"dier the words de la mean de la de la mer, indicating that Marie was
in England at the time. Winkler advances the idea that the author is
considering the matter from the point of view of the hero's native land, and
not from that of her own residence . The probability favors Be"dier . Winkler
would translate: "die dortigen Laendereien," a doubtful interpretation.

173

54 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

There are three English words in the Lais: nihtegale (Laustic, 6), gotelef
(Chievrefoil, 115), and garwalf (Bisclavret, 4, 9). Of the first two Winkler
makes light: gotelef, he says, is not to be found in dictionaries and, there-
fore, may not be an English word. Nihtegale would be a single word that
a French writer might have known and might have been tempted to use on
account of its strangeness. He attaches more importance to garwalf, which
Marie carefully explains; for there is a French word garou. It seems to
Winkler that the statement

Garwalf Tapelent li Norman

and Marie's explanation have no justification for their presence in the poem
unless the word garou had penetrated to Normandy but not to France, and
that Marie was writing for the people of inner France. If that were true
how could Marie de Champagne know the word ?

It seems very improbable that Marie de Champagne would have used
any English words. Her public would be entirely ignorant of English and any
use of English on her part would have been a pedantic and silly display of
knowledge. We are not justified in supposing that she knew any English
words at all. If the word gotelef did not exist in English, the ability to
translate the two parts of the word chievrefoil and to fabricate such a word
would imply a still greater knowledge of English. Nightingale, goat, and
leaf, to which must be added welkesmd sepande (in the Fables), are so diverse
in meaning that they indicate a rather extensive knowledge of English on
the part of the author.

The question as to whether there was any intermediate English version
of the Fables is very complicated, and Winkler cannot solve it, as he himself
admits, after twenty-four pages of discussion.

Winkler does not attempt to prove Marie's statement,

M'entremis de cest livre faire
E de 1'Engleis en Romanz traire

a falsification. He realizes, no doubt, that Marie de Champagne could not
state with very good grace that she translated from English, for she probably
knew no English and the people about her would be aware of that fact.
His way out of the difficulty is again by means of translation and he arrives
at the following: "Ich habe uebernommen, dieses Buch zu schreiben, und
es, das im Englischen vorhanden ist, damit auch dem Franzoesischen zu
vermitteln," but she is to take it from the Latin. This is, of course, impos-
sible: the second de goes with traire and indicates the place from which the
matter must have been taken.

The Espurgatoire has these lines:

Jo, Marie, ai mis en memoire

Le livre de 1'Espurgatoire:

En Romanz qu'il seit entendables

A laie gent e cuvenables.
174

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 55

To Winkler, these lines indicate that Marie was writing on the continent;
for, he argues, there were not enough French-speaking people among the
laity in England at that time to warrant the translation. He is justified,
no doubt, in maintaining that Denis Pyramus' reference to Marie's Lais
(Vie Saint Edmunt, cf. Modern Philology, XII, 351) is not evidence that
Marie lived in England.

The fact that the best manuscripts of all of Marie's works were copied
in England does not imply, according to Winkler, that they were written
there; for the largest number were copied in France and the oldest manu-
script that we have is of the middle of the thirteenth century, which leaves
sufficient time for the poems to have become popular in England and to
have been extensively copied.

Believing that he has shown it unnecessary to assume that Marie lived
in England, Winkler states that the suggestion of J. C. Fox (English His-
torical Review [1910], pp. 303 ff., and [1911], pp. 317 ff.) that Marie was an
abbess of Shaftsbury and an illegitimate daughter of Geoffrey IV Planta-
genet (died 1151), father of Henry II, loses its main support and therefore
falls. Undoubtedly, Fox's identification will remain a more acceptable
hypothesis than that of Winkler.

Winkler believes that the evidence shows only that Marie de France
was connected in some way with the court of England and indicates,
therefore, that she was of noble birth. For the sake of Count William she
is willing to undertake the travail e peine

Ki que m'en tiegne pur vilaine (Prologue to Fables, 36).

That is, according to Winkler, she feels that it is beneath her station to
write. This reminds him of Marie de Champagne who gave Cre"tien de
Troyes the sans et matiere of Lancelot but left to him the painne et antancion,
that is, the menial part of the work. But G. Paris has shown (Romania,
VIII, 39) that Marie is troubled by coarse words that she has to translate.
The context favors G. Paris against Winkler. Other prologues of the time,
such as those of Cre"tien, that of the Roman de Thebes and of the Lais,
the beginning of Guigemar, and the Epilogue to the Fables, these show that
Marie, like other poets of the time, considered it a duty and honor to write
and to use the greatest care in her work. Marie attaches great importance
to her "labor" and fears lest some cleric may claim it as his own.

Winkler adds an extensive but unconvincing and somewhat irrelevant
discussion of the origin of the Lais. In this, he has devoted undue space to
elements in the problem which are beyond his powers or which are of no
positive value to him; as, for example, the long discussions of the immediate
source of Marie's Fables, of English words, and of the origin of the Lais.
Not only is Winkler's study hopelessly weak on the positive side, but he has
failed to give due weight to contradictory evidence. He has neglected to
put together all the allusions to the two Maries. If he had done so, he
would have found that Cre"tien de Troyes (Lancelot), Gautier d' Arras

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56 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

(Brack), Conon de Be"thune and Aubouin de Suzanne, Andreas Capellanus
(De amore), Richard of England (in a poem written from his prison in
Germany), and Evrart (translation of Genesis) designate Marie de Cham-
paigne as Countess, and four call her Countess of Champagne; Eructavit
contains a dedication to Marie, who is addressed as ma dame de Champaigne,
while Aubouin de Suzanne calls her Countess of Brie. On the other hand,
Marie de France is mentioned by Denis Pyramus in his Life of Saint Edmond
as dame Marie simply (Modern Philology, XII, 351). Here we are told
of the great success of her Lais in court circles; but in the seven references
to Marie de Champagne there is no suggestion of any literary talent that
she may have possessed, no reference to any work of hers except the single
letter ascribed to her by Andreas Capellanus. If Marie de Champagne
had written poems showing even mediocre talent they would, undoubtedly,
have been lauded by a dozen poets.

The chronology of the period is difficult to determine and there is still
considerable divergence of opinion among scholars. This fact leaves
Winkler's hypothesis rather hazy in spots. He is of the opinion that both
Cre*tien de Troyes, in Erec, and Gautier d'Arras, in Ille et Galeron, were
influenced by his "Marie." Ille et Galeron was written in 1167, when
Marie de Champagne was only nineteen years old. Could she have been
sufficiently mature at that age to have already written the Lais? The
date of Erec is not fixed, but there is a tendency among scholars, recently,
to date it earlier still. It may be found that the date of Erec is not very
far from 1155, the date when Wace's Brut was completed, for Erec and the
Brut have some similarities: in that year Marie de Champagne was ten
years old.

The whole study seems to me a failure. It is an unfortunate attempt
to force a conclusion, with insufficient evidence in its favor, by means of an
arbitrary and unsound method.

FOSTER E. GUYER
DARTMOUTH COLLEGE

176

Modern Philology

VOLUME XVIII August IQ2O NUMBER 4

A NINTH-CENTURY ASTRONOMICAL TREATISE

In the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy for 1907 (Vol.
XXVI, Section C, pp. 381^445) there was printed for the first time
a Latin computistical treatise compiled by a ninth-century Irish
continental teacher named Dicuil.1 The sole surviving MS of
Dicuil's treatise is now preserved in the Bibliotheque Municipale of
Valenciennes, where it is classed N. 4. 43 (No. 386 in the Catalogue
of Mangeart,2 and 404 in that of Molinier).3 Previously it had
belonged to the monastery of Elno at Saint-Amand, to which it
appears to have been given by Hucbaldus (840-930), who may also
have been its scribe.4 It was brought to Valenciennes during the
period of the French Revolution. It is a parchment quarto of 118
leaves measuring 21.9 by 14.8 cms., written in long lines with 26
to the page. Titles are in capitals sometimes of violet color. Initials
are in red or lilac. The volume is bound in wood covered with
vellum. The writing is in excellent Caroline minuscules of the
latter part of the ninth century — possibly the work of Hucbaldus,5

i For an account of Dicuil and his writings cf. Esposito, Studies, III (1914), pp.
651-76.

i Catalogue des Manuscrits de la Bibliotheque de Valenciennes, Paris, 1860, pp. 375-77.

» Catal. gen. des MSS des Bibl. Publ. de France, Departements, T. XXV (1894), pp.
365-66.

* This we learn from the twelfth-century catalogue of the Saint-Amand library
published by Delisle, Le Cabinet des MSS de la Bibl. Nationale, T. II (1874), p. 451,
No. 93.

s For whom see Manitius, Gesch. d. lot. Lit. des Mittelalters, I (1911), p. 590.
177] 1 [MODBBN PHILOLOGY, August, 1920

«
2 MARIO ESPOSITO

as mentioned above. When at Saint-Amand, the MS was numbered
N. 270. In the inventory printed by Sanderus1 it is N. 247. The
contents of the volume are:

Ff. la-26b: Isidori Etymologiarwn Liber ii.2

Ff. 27a-56b: Disputatio de Rethorica et de Virtutibus sapientissimi
Regis Karoli et Albini Magistri*

F. 57a: Sententiae Septem Sapientium. See Mullach, Fragmenta Phi-
losophorum Graecorum, I (1860), p. 235.

Ff. 57a-60a: A series of diagrams illustrating the divisions and sub-
divisions of philosophy, commencing at the bottom of f. 57a.

Ff. 60b-62a: Origenis Prologue in Canticum Canticorum. See Migne,
Patrol Graeca, XIII, cols. 61 sqq.

Ff. 62b-65a: Dicta Sybillae Magae. Non multi, non vel pauci ....
nullus postea insanam me dicet, sed dei magam. Then follow about 135

verses, Mundus origo mea est, animam de sidere traxi Vita brevis

hominis finita solvitur annis*

F. 65b : Twenty-seven hexameters, ludicii signum tellus sudore madescet
.... Precedet e celo ignisque et sulfuris amnis. For this famous poem see
Haupt, Opuscula, I (1875), p. 289; Sackur, Sibyllinische Texte, p. 187;
Oracula Sibyllina bearb. von J. Geffcken, Leipzig, 1902, pp. 154-55. This
copy has not been collated.

Ff. 66a-118a: DicuiPs Computus, without either title or scribal explicit.

F. 118b: blank.

The scribe has evidently taken great pains in transcribing
DicuiPs Computus, for he has made many corrections in his own
work. As Manitius5 remarks, he appears to have taken to heart
DicuiPs line (p. 413, 1. 6), Rustica ne scribant has membra caveto
loquelas. Other corrections are due to later hands. Palaeographi-
cally the script presents all the characteristics of late ninth-century
Caroline minuscule.6 The combination ae is frequently so written,
but we also find 9 and simply e. In the matter of spelling we find
the usual peculiarities and inconsistencies, e.g., ymnus, rythmus and
rithmus, ciclus, dyptongus, dactilus, pirgis, inicio, nunciabo, renunciabo,

1 Bibliotheca Belgica Manuscripta, Insulis, 1641, Pars I, pp. 54-55.

* This copy is not mentioned in Lindsay's recent edition (Oxford, 1911).

» For this work see Manitius, op. tit., pp. 282-83, who does not mention this copy.

« There is a copy of this tract in the Bodleian MS Auct. T. 2. 23, ft., 88b-93a, of
saec. X.

6 Op. cit.t p. 650.

« The facsimile given in the Academy's edition (Plate XXII) represents f. 67a (not
67b as stated).

178

A NINTH-CENTURY ASTRONOMICAL TREATISE 3

but nuntiatas, nuntiatio, etc., endecas, scemata, disticon, scola,
audatia, suptilis, linia and linea, zoziaco, distingitur, pasca and
pascha, pascalis and paschalis, decennovennalis and decennovenalis,
compotus, spaciosae, repperitur and reperitur, anastasseos, adfirmatur,
reuma, adsissa.

Dicuil's Computus was long attributed to Alcuin,1 a mistake
which arose from the note of contents in a twelfth-century hand on
f. la of the MS, Item rethorica Albini ad Karolum et computus eiusdem
ad eundem. The true authorship was first pointed out in 1855 by
Bethmann.2 A transcript of the tract was made by J. Heller3 in
1875, from which Diimmler4 printed some of the verses, including
the two Ymni per rythmum facti (I, 9, and II, 7, ed. pp. 397, 405).
The structure of these verses was investigated by Ebert,5 and by
Wilhelm Meyer.6 The latter printed the third Ymnus (II, 14, ed.
p. 414), and pointed out that Dicuil is an early example of a writer
who uses hexameters with end-rhymes. Subsequent to the publica-
tion of the Academy's edition in 1907, a summary analysis of the
work was given by Dr. Max Manitius.7

The Computus is divided into four books (Libelli), and is written
partly in prose and partly in verse. As a scientific exposition its
value is small. The arrangement is chaotic and the chapters follow
one another in the most arbitrary manner imaginable. The treatment
of the subject is anything but clear and the work is in fact a clumsy
complication extracted from previous writers. Dicuil wrote, as we
shall presently see, in France in the years 814-16, at a period when,
thanks to the Carolingian revival of learning, astronomical (or
rather computistical) studies were being cultivated with extraor-
dinary interest at the Frankish court. To the early works of

1 E.g., by Sanderus (loc, cit.), by the authors of the Histoire literaire de la France,
VI (1742), pp. ix-x, and by Mangeart (loc. ci*.), who printed the five opening hexameters.
Sanderus had given the index of chapters.

2 Archiv der Gesellschaft fUr altere deutsche Geschichtskunde, XI (1855), p. 521.
» Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft, etc., II (1877), p. 305.

*Ibid., IV (1879), pp. 256-58, and Mon. Germ. Hist., Poetae, II (1884), p. 668.

8 Allgemeine Gesch. der Lit. des Mittelalters, II (1880), pp. 392-93.

• Sitzungsberichte der Philos.-Philol. Classe der M&nchener Akademie, I (1882), pp.
68 n., 91, 94, 97, and Gesammelte Abhl. zur mittellateinischen Rythmik, I (1905), pp. 193,
194, 195, 216, 220, 222.

' Gesch. d. lat. Lit., etc., I (1911), pp. 649-51; see a note by Hellmann, Neuet
Archiv, XXXVI (1911), p. 623.

179

4 MARIO ESPOSITO

Victorius of Aquitaine (Cursus Paschalis, ed. Mommsen, Chronica
Minora, I [1892], pp. 669 sqq.), of Dionysius Exiguus1 (ap. Migne,
Patrologia Latino,, LXVII, cols. 19-28 and 483-520), of Isidore of
Seville (Etymologiarum vi. 17), to the series of tracts edited by
Bruno Krusch (Studien zur christlich-miUelalterlichen Chronologic,
Leipzig, 1880), and to the later works of Beda (De Ratione Computi;
De Temporum Ratione; De Temporibus; ap. Migne, Patrol. Lat.,
XC), and the so-called "Munich Computus"2 of 718, were now added
the great astronomico-computistical compilation of the latter part
of the eighth century3 and the tracts derived from it, such as the
De Cursu et Saltu Lunae ac Bissexto of Alcuin4 (Migne, Patrol. Lat.,
CI, 981-1002), the anonymous Liber de Computo drawn up in 810,
published by Muratori,5 and reprinted by Migne (PL, CXXIX,
1275-1372), and the extensive compilations of about 809 and 811-12,
of which numerous MSS are in existence.6 It was from these works
that writers such as Dungal (81 1)7 and Dicuil (814-16), employed at
the Carolingian court, were able to derive their tracts. It is note-
worthy that the discussion in verse at the commencement of Book
II of Dicuil's work (ed. pp. 398-400), on the distances between
heaven and earth and between the seven planets according to the
estimate of Pythagoras and the ancient pagan sages is taken directly
from the Historia Naturalis of Pliny (ii, 21, 83; 22, 84; 23, 85, ed.
Sillig, 1851), a book from which Dicuil made very large extracts in
his later tract De Mensura Orbis Terrae.8 The vague references to

1 Dicuil mentions this writer by name (ed. p. 424, 1. 12), though he has probably
taken the reference from later compilations.

*See on this still imprinted work MacCarthy, Annals of Ulster, IV (1901), pp.
bcvii-lxxiv.

» A thorough investigation of this work is much to be desired; cf. K. Ruck, AuszUge
aus der Naturgeschichte des Plinius in einem astronomisch-komputistischen Sammelwerke
des achten Jahrhunderts, Munchen, 1888; Manitius, Gesch., I, pp. 286, 373, 447.

« Ibid., I, pp. 285-87.

* Anecdota ex Ambros. Bibl. Codicibus, III, Patavii, 1713, pp. 114-203; cf. Gabriel
Meier, Die sieben freien Kiinste im Mittelalter, II (1887), pp. 6-7 (Programm des Stifle*
Einsiedeln, Studienjahr 1886-87).

6 E.g., four at Paris (cf. Delisle, Cat. des MSS des fonds Libri et Barrois, 1888, pp.
63-68, 72-76, 76-78, 81-84), one at Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, L. 95, of tenth century,
and Monte Cassino 3 (cf. Bibl. Casinensis, I (1873), pp. 84 sqq., and ibid., Florilegium,
pp. 57-96) ; Manitius, op. cit., pp. 286, 373, 447. Further investigation of these MSS
is much to be desired.

7 Manitius, op. cit., pp. 373-74.

• See on this point Esposito, Studies, III (1914), p. 665.

180

A NINTH-CENTURY ASTRONOMICAL TREATISE 5

"Pagani" or "Philosophi" (ed. pp. 415, 441, 444) are taken from
Isidore of Seville (Etymol iii. 31-70; V, 30, 5-8, etc.).1

As a teacher of grammar Dicuil took a great interest in metrical
subjects, and one of the special attractions by which he sought to
please King Louis the Pious, to whom he dedicated his work, was
the introduction of two chapters (i. 8, and ii. 13, pp. 392 and 408)
entitled De ludifitis versibus, in the first of which four hexameters
are so constructed that the four verse-endings being retained they
may be transformed into 72 hexameters which yield a quasi-meaning,
and in the second the permutation is carried to produce 166 verses.
DicuiFs model here is the poet Optatianus Porphyrius (c. 350 A.D.),2
whose ingenious constructions were very popular and often imitated
in the Caroline and pre-Caroline epochs.8 This poet's Carmen 254
(recens. L. Miiller, Lipsiae, 1877, pp. 26-28) is closely followed by
Dicuil both for the construction of the four verses and for the method
of permuting them.5

Reference has already been made to the three Ymni per rythmum
facti. Other evidences of grammatical interest are the mention of
Donatus (ed. p. 395, 1. 36), and the lines at the end of the work
(p. 445, 11. 11-27), the last of which is a quotation from Vergil
(Aeneid i. 374). At p. 444, 11. 13-20, he points out the difficulty
of being always clear in the treatment of technical subjects in
verse, and states that he had for that reason dealt with some
questions both metrically and in prose.

A few references to the Bible6 may be noted.

The following information concerning Dicuil's personal history
may be obtained from the Computus:

i There is as yet no comprehensive treatment of the history of astronomy in the
early Middle Ages; cf. Sickel, Wiener Sitzungsberichte, Ph.- Hist. Classe, XXXVIII
(1862), pp. 153-201; Meier, Sieben freien KKnste, II (1887), pp. 3-15, 22-36; Cantor,
Vorlesungen Hber Gesch. der Mathematik, I, 2° Aufl. (1894), pp. 495, 532, 780 sqq.; Mac-
Carthy. Annals of Ulster, IV, pp. xiv-clxxxii.

2Cf. Teuffel, Gesch. d. rdm. Lit., 6« Aufl., Ill (1913), pp. 216-17.

3 Manitius, Gesch., I, p. 754. Beda De arte metrica, cap. xxiv (PL, XC, 173), speaks
of the insigne volumen Porphyrii Poetae.

< In the older editions (PL, XIX, 431) it is numbered 26.

6 On p. 394, 1. 5, remove stop after solis; p. 411, 1. 5, correct verbis to ciclos; p.
411,1.41, is clearly wrong; p. 412, 1.3, correct verbis to ciclos; p. 413, 1. 4, correct ciclos
to verbis.

« E.g., p. 389, 1. 33, cf. Ill Reg. 17:11; p. 390, 11. 20-21, cf. Luc. 21:2-3; p. 432,
1. 32, cf. Luc. 23 : 54-56; p. 432, 1. 40, cf. Luc. 1 :26.

181

6 MAfeio ESPOSITO

Dicuil was the author (ed. pp. 390, 1. 13, 395, 1. 21) ; he was an
Irishman (p. 388, 1. 23); he was living in France, possibly in the
capacity of a teacher of grammar at the court school (p. 444,
1. 23), and compiled his treatise as a series of yearly gifts to
Charlemagne's successor, Louis the Pious (pp. 382, 1. 28, 389, 1. 32,
390, 1. 12, 395, 1. 20, 396, 1. 39, 404, 1. 30, 408, 1. 28, 413, 1. 5, 414, 1. 22,
439, 1. 17); the first book was commenced in April 814 (p. 383, 1. 7),
and the fourth chapter was written on the 18th day of that month
(p. 386, 1. 20) ; Dicuil intended to present this book to Louis on the
occasion of the Frankish festival on May 14 when the nobles
would be making their annual presents1 to the king (ed. p. 390,
1. 17), but Louis does not appear to have been pleased with the Irish-
man's labors, for the latter complains (p. 395, 1. 39) that though he
was present while Dicuil was reciting his verses he would not listen
nor offer any reward; the second book was composed in 815 (ed.
pp. 402, 1. 9, 414, 1. 25), and Dicuil states that should anything in
it appear obscure to the king he will explain it when they meet
(p. 414, 1. 21) ; the date of the third book is not given, but the fourth
was completed in 816 (p. 444, 1. 39), when, as he tells us (p. 440,
1. 37), he was living far away from the sea. At p. 444, 1. 12, he notes
the unsatisfactory nature of his source (Isidore of Seville) and states
that if anybody else would furnish a better account of the subject
under discussion he would willingly adopt it.

DicuiPs Computus appears to have remained totally unknown
down to modern times. Later ninth-century writers on the same
subject, e.g., Hrabanus Maurus of Fulda whose De Compute? was
written in 820, and Helpericus of Auxerre, whose work with the
same title* dates from about 850, had no knowledge of Dicuil.
Indeed the fact that we possess only one MS of his work shows
that it was a complete failure and was but rarely copied.

The printed text of the Computus shows many signs of ignorance,
misreading of the MS, and inexperience on the part of the editor.

* On this custom cf. Waltz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, TV, 2« Aufl. (1885), pp.
107-11, and Hibernici Exulis Carmen ii, v. 8 ap. Dtimmler, Poetae, I (1881), p. 396.

* Ed.Baluze, Miscellanea, euro. Mansi, II, Lucae, 1761, pp. 62-84; Migne, PL, CVII,
669-728.

' Migne, PL, CXXXVII, 17-48. Both Hrabanus and Helpericus are superior to
Dicuil in clearness of exposition and orderly arrangement. Their tracts were widely
read.

182

A NINTH-CENTURY ASTRONOMICAL TREATISE 7

These deficiencies may perhaps be condoned when it is remembered
that at the date of publication (August, 1907) the editor was nineteen
years of age. In the following pages I give a collation of the printed
text with the original MS, and also suggest some emendations which
appear to me to be necessary:

P. 381, 11. 8-9, Dicuili .... Astronomia, this title is not in the
MS; 1. 17, decennovennalibus MS; p. 382, 1. 12, decennovennali MS;
1. 17, for saltu the MS corrects bissexto in the margin; 11. 26-27,
Libellus .... I, title not in MS; 1. 29, Per ludum MS; 1. 32,
numquam MS; p. 383, 1. 3, fiant MS; 1. 4, primae qu^ MS; 1. 8,
qu§ MS; 1. 20, quotcumque MS; p. 384, 1. 20, sublati MS; 1. 23,
manifeste MS; p. 385, 1. 7, uel cum MS; 1. 13, for at MS has ac; 1. 17,
numquam MS; 1. 36 for diurnum MS has diuinum; 1. 37, read
mensium, and for last word aut MS has uel; p. 386, 1. 1, concluditur
et quoniam MS; 1. 4, for summa MS has sancta; 1. 15, for iniamus
MS has uiuamus; 1. 23, superfuerant MS; 1. 27, praenuntiatas MS;
1. 35, read subtractos; 1. 36, superfuerint and superesse MS; 1. 37,
superfuerit MS; 1. 38, for tali MS has uel alio; 1. 39, peruenire MS;
p. 387, 1. 19, supersunt MS; 1. 24, superesse MS; 1. 37, remove
commas after Martii and Septembri; 1. 39, remove commas after
Martii and Novembri; p. 388, 1. 28, falletue MS; 1. 38, sepe MS;1
p. 389, 1. 3, for et MS has uel; 1. 7, super MS; 1. 24, multitudinem
MS; 1. 40, post consumptum primum MS; p. 390, 1. 8, per dictos
MS; 1. 9, remove stop after videtur; 1. 14, remove stop after annos;
1. 15, peregi MS; 1. 19, for iulea MS has uilia; p. 391, 1. 13, in col.
10 MS has XXVI;2 1. 19, col. 4, MS has XV and in col. 11 it has ii;
1. 25, col. 1, remove Emb.; p. 392, 1. 13, col. 11 above xxx insert
Emb., and in col. 12 MS has xxviii; 1. 22, col. 12, MS reads viiii;
p. 393, 1. 4, remove stop after bina; 1. 29, for L read uel; p. 395, 1. 10,
this line should read as in MS Lucida per longos miscentes famina
ciclos; 1. 30, quocumque MS; p. 396, 1. 1, remove stop after canto;
1. 9, for spondet is MS reads spondeis; 1. 13, prorsus MS; 1. 19,
for summus read summis; 1. 24, for Tu read In; 1. 28, for qui MS has
quoniam; 1. 39, for ne of MS we should emend nee; 1. 40, Franci
MS; 1. 41, read Augusto; p. 397, 1. 22, read Metaplasmos; 1. 27,

1 In lines 15 and 19 read uniuscuiusque.
* On p. 391, 1. 2, read tyrannica.

183

8 MAEIO ESPOSITO

for Nam read with MS Non; 1. 28, for vera read with MS iura;
p. 398, 11. 1-2, Libellus . . . . I, no title in MS; 1. 10, Leuuarum
MS; 1. 17, leuuarum MS; 1. 19, leuuae MS; 1. 20, leuuas MS;
1. 21, consumunt MS; 1. 23, we should perhaps emend to per milia;
1. 27, leuuis MS; 1. 35, suptili MS; p. 399, 1. 1, read praememoratis;
1. 8, numerant MS; 1. 11, read si milia,1 1. 12, leuuas MS; 1. 13,
leuuae MS; 1. 32, leuuae MS; 1. 38, at the end of this line in the right-
hand margin of the MS (f. 79b) is a "signe de renvoi" indicating that
two verses written in the lower margin of the MS are to be inserted:

Cum solem adfirment alii lunamque habitare
In firmamento summo inter sidera fixa.

P. 400, 1. 1, this line is defective; 11. 3, 4, these lines to be inserted after
p. 399, 1. 38, as indicated; 1. 5, not in MS; 1. 11, multiplica MS;
1. 15, after ilium a word is effaced; 1. 24, dierumque MS; 1. 26, for
esse MS reads est; 1. 27, constat MS; 1. 29, for quern MS reads
quoniam; 1.32, for regalis erit M$ reads regulariter; 1. 37, for dominus
MS reads deus; p. 401, 1. 27, quolibet MS; 1. 32, read priori;
p. 402, 1. 3, spectaveris MS; 1. 19, unoquoque MS; 1. 36, finiatur
MS; p. 403, 1. 8, for Ibic read with MS Hie; 1. 19, after subtrahere
add memento; 1. 37, tantundem MS; p. 404, 1. 2, antecedente MS;
1. 14, tamen MS; 1. 17, embolismi MS; 1. 28, after secundo insert in
alio;2 p. 405, 1. 1, for cicli read with MS diei; 1. 8, for fallerit read
with MS fefellerit; 1. 14, for videris read volueris; 1. 20, for sic read
with MS sicut; 1. 32, rithmus MS; p. 406, 1. 13, for primumque
tenet we should perhaps emend primum retinet; 1. 27, mundus MS;
p. 407, 1. 5, saltus MS; 1. 10, orti MS; 1. 16, nouies MS; p. 408,
1. 5, perhaps we should read semper per pasca; 1. 11, Illos cum MS;
1. 18, octos is clearly wrong; 1. 19, for est et the MS has esset; 1. 21,
quis MS; 1. 28, insert comma after rector, and remove comma after
multorum; 1. 29, for Si MS reads Sis; 1. 38, for binae read bina;
p. 409, 11. 3-5, these three verses are written in the lower margin of the
MS with a "signe de renvoi" for their insertion after p. 409, 1. 2;
p. 410, 1. 5, tardantis MS; p. 410, 1. 8, tardantis MS; p. 413, 1. 6,
read Rustica ne; 1. 24, for parabis read with MS porro bis;3 1. 28,

1 On p. 399, 1. 10, read semlta.
1 In this line numque seems wrong.

1 On p. 413, 1. 26, for Si per emend Semper, and on p. 416, 1. 17, read continenter.

184

A NINTH-CENTURY ASTRONOMICAL TREATISE 9

after this verse insert the line Postremos script! qui non sunt sed
numerati; 1. 30, remove stop after valerent; p. 414, 1. 2, for et MS
reads uel; 1. 12, nimpe MS; 1. 23, Sis MS; 1. 26, promisum MS;
1. 35, pirgis MS; 1. 38, after volo place a full stop; p. 415, 11. 1-2,
title not in MS; 1. 3, nimpe MS; 1. 7, read errantum; 1. 32, heading
not in MS; 1. 33, for baud read quern, and note that II. 33 and 34 are
to be written as two hexameters; p. 416, 1. 9, read inaequalem; 1. 19,
under die in the MS are three dots meaning that the word is to be
omitted; 1. 19, read in sequent! ; 1. 32, omit comma after custodientes;
p. 417, 1. 1, title not in MS; 1. 11, for diem duorum the MS has uel
duos; 1. 12, transilias MS; 1. 17, unoquoque MS; 1. 29, for Quin MS
reads Quoniam; 1. 37, for ast read ac; p. 418, 1. 2, reperietur MS; 1. 3,
iii is not in MS; 1. 5, primo MS; 1. 8, insert comma after sumet; 1. 11,
scribendum MS; 1. 23, for Plene his ex bis read Plene ex his ; p. 419, 1. 5,
col. 9, for ast read et ; 1. 13, col. 2, MS reads Id. and so down the column;
1. 20, col. 10, insert i; 1. 24, col 10, insert i; 1. 28, col. 10, insert i; p. 420,
1. 2, read unoquoque; 1. 20, tantundem MS; 1. 22, bissextum MS;
1. 26, occurrere MS; 1. 37, iii MS; 1. 38, for numeri MS reads nostri;
1. 39, for certa read certe; 1. 39, for Quin read Quoniam; 1. 41, cicli
MS; 1. 41, comma after decennovenali ; p. 421, 1. 1, comma after
undecimo; 1. 2, comma after duodecimo; 1. 11, viii MS; 1. 20, exordio
MS; 1. 34, for et MS has uel, and for Quin it has Quoniam; 1. 36,
for diem MS has diei; p. 422, 1. 18, for et MS has uel;1 1. 22, posse-
derit MS; 1. 33, Quoniam MS; p. 423, 1. 11, inuicem MS; 1. 15,
for quae MS has duae; 1. 16, for quae MS has duae; 1. 17, for at
read ac; 1. 22, after endecadis the MS inserts anni; p. 424, 1. 9,
for aut MS reads uel; 1. 12, for doni suis exiguis the MS reads Dio-
nisius Exiguus; 1. 15, for ast read ac; 1. 19, eaedem MS; 1. 21,
nimpe MS; 1. 22, manserint MS; 1. 23, for ast read ac; 1. 27, for
ast read ac; p. 425, 1. 12, read consummatis; 1. 22, after die MS
inserts sancto; p. 426, 1. 2, transilias MS; 1. 4, read consummatis;
1. 5, inter MS; 1. 18, for ast read at; 1. 25, read transilias; 1. 41, pas-
cales MS; p. 427, 1. 12, remove stop after manifestat; 1. 24, in the
column of figures under iii insert i; 1. 28, remove comma after ratione;
p. 428, 1. 7, decennovennali MS; 1. 33, read additis; p. 429, 1. 32,
viiii MS; 1. 33, read uniuscuiusque; p. 431, 1. 31, heading not in

1 On p. 422, 1. 11, read anastasseos.

185

10 MlRIO ESPOSITO

MS; I 34, read hoc est; p. 432, 1. 5, tantundem MS; 1. 6, after
incarnationis MS adds Domini;1 1. 16, Moysaicum MS; 1. 18, read
imperium; 1. 19, uigesimi MS; 1. 21, terram MS; 1. 30, place a full
stop after incipiebant; 1. 30, Propterea MS; 1. 31, after sabbati the
MS inserts que ante dominicam resurrectionem diei sabbati; 1. 38,
for dominus MS reads deus; p. 433, 11. 1-2, heading not in MS; 1. 8,
for de sidere MS reads desidero; 1. 15, tacent MS; 1. 17, read in-
cipimus; 1. 30, Sin MS; p. 434, 1. 2, read Ixxiiae and remove ac;
1. 6, remove stop after bissexti; 1. 6, illas MS; 1. 11, incrementum
MS; 1. 14, remove comma after habeantur; 1. 15, read unusquisque;
1. 23, read unumquodque; 1. 32, integro MS; p. 435, 1. 9, remove
et; 1. 10, for quam read que;2 1. 15, read DCCCCLX; 1. 23, read
sexagesima; 1. 24, for die read dies; 1. 25, DCCCC orum LX MS;
1. 27, for et read uel; 1. 32, read adsissa; 1. 33, not in MS; 1. 36,
for quin MS has quoniam; p. 436, 1. 11, for luminis read lunis; 1. 12,
illas MS; 1. 13, remove comma after pluraliter and insert Et before
ab; 1. 15, for xxx read vi; p. 437, 1. 1, heading not in MS;
1. 7, for Quod read Quot; 1. 12, read deesse; 1. 15, remove comma
after centum; 1. 30, heading not in MS; 1. 36, for quae read qui;
1. 37, read expulimus; p. 438, 1. 8, read CC tis; 1. 10, for L read C;
1. 12, Tantundem MS; 1. 22, for lunaris read with MS lunas; 1. 24,
read plus quam; 1. 25, read uniuscuiusque ; 1. 30, for et MS has
uel; 1. 31, place comma after fiant; p. 439, 1. 1, remove comma after
dies; 1. 18, after sol MS inserts in; 1. 27, heading not in MS; 1. 35,
for lunare read luna; p. 440, 1. 2, for xvii read with MS xxii; 1. 3,
remove comma after diebus; 1. 5, remove comma after diebus; 1. 19,
under second dixi there are four dots in the MS indicating that it is to
be omitted; 1. 21, xxviiii MS; 1. 22, under second numeri six dots
for omission; 1. 28, read tardam; 1. 30, rursum MS; p. 441, 1. 1,
heading omitted in MS; 1. 10 for ast read et; 1. 11, for et read ac;
1. 12, Ixxiii MS; 1. 34, for at read ac; 1. 36, read cessante; 1. 37,
after transmigrent place a comma; p. 442, 1. 3, incessabile MS; 1. 4,
heading not in MS; 1. 9, omit te; 1. 23, read bisse with MS; 1. 23,
place comma after horae; 1. 24, comma after transcurrat; 1. 26,
comma after peragrat; 1. 30, read bisse; 1. 34, zoziaco MS; 1. 39,

i On p. 432, 1. 9. read calculationis.
a On p. 435, 1. 13, read uniuscuiusque.

186

A NINTH-CENTURY ASTRONOMICAL TREATISE 11

xliiii MS; p. 443, 1. 8, xiii MS; 1. 16, comma after ostento; 1. 16,
for At and ast read ac; 1. 23, zoziacum MS; 1. 25, read xxvii; 1. 26,
read CXL; p. 444, 1. 1, under dum in MS are three dots for omission;
1. 26, Perfecte MS; 1. 27, £/M'S Zme requires emendation; 1. 39, remove
comma after octo; p. 445, 1. 7, /or semper read wY/i M£ both times
sepe; 1. 12, for Non perhaps Nam; 1. 21, for paria read pariter;
1. 25, this line should perhaps be thus emended: Promissis multis iam
sero pauca relatu.1

We may conclude with some remarks on the Latinity of the
Computus:

For Aprilis Dicuil (or the scribe) writes everywhere Aprelis, a
form which is not registered in any of the standard lexicons (The-
saurus Linguae Latinae, Lipsiae, 1900-1915; Georges, Ausf. Lat.-
Deutsches Handworterbuch, 8e Aufl., 4 vols., Leipzig, 1912-19); the
form bisse (p. 442) for besse is given in the Thesaurus (s.v. bes),
and leuua (pp. 398, 399) for leuga, leuca, occurs in Beda and else-
where (cf. Du Cange, ed. Henschel, s.v. leuca). Referring to the
tides Dicuil (p. 435) uses the terms reuma, adsissa, and recessa.
For reuma see Du Cange (s.v. rheuma) and Columbani Ep. v, ed.
Gundlach, Epistolae, III (1892), p. 174; Vita Condediii, ed. Levison,
Script. Rer. Merov., V (1910), p. 651; Vita Vulframni viii, ibid.,
p. 667; Beda De Temporum Ratione xxix, PL, XC, 423. For
adsissa (assisa) see Isidore De ordine creaturarum ix. 5, 7, PL,
LXXXIII, 936, 937; the word occurs as a gloss on dodrans in a
Latin poem published by Thurneysen (Revue Celtique, XI (1890),
p. 89). Recessa is employed by Isidore, op. cit.} ix. 7, assisa
sit recessa.

The following words are not given by Georges: ludificus (pp.
381, 382, 397, 414); ordinaliter (383, 418, 426); oda (393, 396);
praememorare (408, 417, 427); endecas (416, 423); iterate (417,
423); solanus (417, 427, 428, 431); decennovalis (420, 421); incar-
natio (422, 432); inconfuse (423); titulate (431); ostentum (434,
435, 439); quadrantilis (435, 439).

The following are examples of late and technical words: alter-
natim, anastassis, anchora (canonica), binarius, bissextilis, bissextus,
calculatio, ciclus, circumlustrare, codiculus, compotus, congregatim,

1 On p. 390, 1. 23, for crescesque read gregesque; p. 441, 1. 21, chias seems wrong.

187

12 MARIO ESPOSITO

congrue, eonnumerare, continuatim, contrarietas, conversing creatio,
decennovennalis, diphthongus, elongare, embolismus, epacta, evan-
gelicus, famen, fulgescere, horoscopus, immobiliter, immutabiliter,
incessabilis, indictio, insensatus, metaplasmus, momentum, ogdoas,
parasceue, pascha, paschalis, pirgus, punctus, quadragesima, quad-
rivium, recapitulatio, regulare, rotalis, rotella, rotula, saltus
(lunaris), septempliciter, sparsim, specialiter, spiritalis, subsequenter,
subulcus, tonus, transcensus, trigeni, unarius, veraciter, versificus.

MARIO ESPOSITO
DUBLIN, IRELAND

188

WALPOLE'S RELATIONS WITH VOLTAIRE1

A study of the Walpole- Voltaire correspondence is interesting
from the historical point of view chiefly because it shows that
in 1768 — eight years, that is to say, before the notorious letter2
which Voltaire wrote to d'Argental on the publication of Letourneur's
translation of Shakespeare — the "apostle and martyr of the English "
was already repenting of having introduced the "histrion bar bare"
to French readers in his Lettres philosophiques. It shows us too how
the dilettante Walpole was willing to "fight to the death for the
superiority of Shakespeare," and reminds us that it was partly
toward this end that he produced his Castle of Otranto, a novel in
which the sublime and the ridiculous were united in supposedly
Shakespearean proportions, and the "deportment of the domestics"
was based on the gravediggers' scene in Hamlet. Further, we can
reconstruct by this means the story of the clash between these two
kindred spirits, the man of the world dabbling in literature on the one
hand, the man of letters posing as a leader of society on the other.

i Bibliography:

Correspondence complete de Mme du Deffand avec la Duchesse de Choiseul, I'abbi
BartMlemy, et M. Craufurt (ed. le Marquis de Sainte-Aulaire, 3 torn., 1877; orig. ed.,
2 torn., 1859; nouv ed. augm., 1866).

Correspondence complete de la Marquise Du Deffand avec ses amis le President Renault,
Montesquieu, D' Alembert, Voltaire, Horace Walpole, precedee d'une histoire de sa vie, etc.
(ed. M. de Lescure, 2 torn., 1865).

Lettres de la Marquise du Deffand a Horace Walpole, depuis comte d' Or ford, ecritea
dans les annees 1766 a 1780; auxquelles sont jointes des lettres de Madame du Deffand a
Voltaire, ecrites dans les annees 1759 a 1775. Publiees d'apres les originaux deposes A
Strawberry- Hill (nouv. ed., augm. des extraits des lettres d' Horace Walpole, ed. N. T.
Artaud, 4 torn., 1824 [this edition is a translation of Miss Berry's edition of 1810]).

Letters of the Marquise Du Deffand to the Hon. Horace Walpole, afterward Earl of
Orford, from 1.766 to 1780. To which are added Letters of Mme du Deffand to Voltaire from
1759 to 1775. Published from the originals at Strawberry Hill (ed. with a life of the
authoress and notes, by Miss Mary Berry, 4 vols., 1810).

Lettres de la Marquise du Deffand a Horace Walpole (1766-1780) (ed. Mrs. Paget
Toynbee, 3 torn., 1912).

Correspondence litteraire, philosophique, et critique, par Grimm, Diderot, Raynal,
Meister, etc. (ed. Tourneux, 1877).

Voltaire, (Euvres (ed. Beuchot, 1833 [the letters to Walpole are in Vol. LXV]).

Letters of Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford (ed. Paget Toynbee, 1891).

The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole (2d ed., with Preface, 1767).

Churton Collins, Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau in England (1908).

* Voltaire to d'Argental, July 19, 1776; this letter is quoted below, p. 199, n. 5.
189] 13 [MODBEN PHILOLOGY, August, 1920

14 M. B. FIN&H AND E. ALLINSON PEERS

Voltaire was a "very" great man, Walpole a sufficiently small one;
Voltaire was a cosmopolitan, his antagonist as full of insular preju-
dices as though he had never crossed the Channel; yet in this instance
their motives and their methods of controversy are amusingly similar
and equally questionable. In the end, circumstances rather than
any merit of his own gave Walpole the beau rdle and allowed him to
write later a summary account,1 breathing virtuous disgust in every
line; yet the quarrel would never have arisen had he not published
some remarks on Voltaire as irrelevant as they were personal.

At this period Walpole was very popular in French society. The
son of a prime minister whose policy had given France peace, he was
also an Englishman in an age of Anglomania, and the owner of a
complete Gothic castle in days when few French landscape gardens
possessed anything more imposing than a Cave of Melancholy, or
at most, like the Due de Choiseul's park at Chanteloup, a Pagoda of
Friendship. And Strawberry Hill contained too the "Officina
Arbuteana," volumes from the presses of which were much sought
after in Paris. We hear of gifts to Madame Necker, the Duchesse
de Choiseul, the Abbe* Barthelemy; of a complete set sent at the
request of the librarian to the Royal Library itself. Grimm pre-
sents Walpole to the sovereigns of Northern Europe as the son of
Sir Robert, the wittiest of Englishmen in Paris, the ill-advised
printer of the President Renault's worthless Cornttie, a martyr to
the gout, and — most important of all — the author of "la lettre du roi
de Prusse a J-J Rousseau, qui a joue* un si grand role dans la querelle
de David Hume."2

It was this letter which won for Walpole an unusual vogue at the
moment of its appearance, and caused him a great deal of annoyance

» "About the same time Voltaire published in the Mercure the letter he had written
to me, but I made no answer, because he had treated me more dirtily than Mr. Hume had.
Though Voltaire, with whom I had never had the least acquaintance or correspondence,
had voluntarily written to me first and asked for my book [Historic Doubts on Richard III],
he wrote a letter to the Duchess of Choiseul, in which, without saying a syllable of his
having written to me first, he told her I had officiously sent him my Works, and declared
war with him in defence de ce bouffon Shakespeare, whom in his reply to me he had pre-
tended so much to admire. The Duchess sent me Voltaire's letter, which gave me such
contempt for his disingenuity that I dropped all correspondence with him" (Walpole,
Short Notes of My Life, April 24, 1769).

2 Grimm, op. cit., July 15, 1768. The President sent Voltaire a copy of this Straw-
berry Hill edition of Cornelie (Mme du Deffand to Voltaire, July 3, 1768; to Walpole,
November 9, 1767).

190

WALPOLE'S RELATIONS WITH VOLTAIRE 15

six months later. He wrote it at Paris in January, 1766, by way of
ridiculing the affectations of Rousseau, who had just passed through
the city with Hume, on his "flight" to England. The persecution
to which he imagined he was subjected, and the martyrdom he
seemed thirsting to endure, had provoked universal interest, though
anything but universal sympathy. Walpole's not very witty jeu
d'esprit1 thus made him the fashion for the moment,2 and when
that fashion showed signs of dying a natural death it was revived
by the quarrel between Rousseau and Hume, which, thanks to
Grimm's Correspondence, Suard's Expose, Hume's Concise and
Genuine Account, Walpole's Narrative, and countless other pamphlets,
prevented Voltaire, like the rest of Europe, from not knowing the
name of Hume's "accomplice."3

It is thus not at all surprising that Voltaire should have wished
to know more of the Englishman who had been teasing one of the
blackest of his betes noires. He was too a genuinely devoted friend
of Walpole's correspondent, Mme du Deffand; he owed to her rela-
tive Choiseul, another of Walpole's admirers, the prosperity of his
manufactures at Ferney; he seems to have met Sir Robert during
his stay in England (1726-29); his relations with the circle of
Grimm and D'Alembert suggest that he knew most of what went

1 Le Roi de Prusse a Monsieur Rousseau.
"MoN CHER JEAN-JACQUES,

" Vous avez renoncS §, G6n6ve votre patrie; vous vous e"tes fait chasser de la Suissef
pays tant vantS dans vos Merits ; la France vous a decrSte. Venez done chez moi ; j 'admire
vos talens; je m'amuse de vos reveries, qui (soit dit en passant) vous occupent trop,
et trop long terns. II faut & la fin §tre sage et heureux. Vous avez assez fait parler de
vous par des singularity peu convenables a un veritable grand nomine. DSmontrez a
vos ennemis que vous pouvez avoir quelquefois le sens commun: cela les fachera, sans
vous faire tort. Mes 6tats vous offrent une retraite paisible; je vous veux du bien, et je
vous en ferai, si vous le trouvez bon. Mais si vous vous obstiniez a rejeter mon secours,
attendez-vous que je ne le dirai a personne. Si vous persistez a vous creuser 1'esprit
pour trouver de nouveaux malheurs, choisissez-les tels que vous voudrez. Je suis roi, je
puis vous en procurer au gre de vos souhaits: et ce qui surement ne vous arrivera pas
vis a vis de vos ennemis, je cesserai de vous persecutor quand vous cesserez de mettre

votre gloire a l'6tre.

"Votre bon ami,

"FRED£RIC"

z See bis letters to Conway, January 12, 1766; Chute, January 15, 1766; Gray,
January 25, 1766.

« A full account of the dispute appears in Churton Collins, op. cit., pp. 217-41.
Walpole's letters to Hume (July 26, November 1 and 11, 1766) show him adopting, as
he did in his Narrative, an attitude of well-bred contempt for all mere scribblers and
philosophes; he cannot, however, conceal his annoyance at D'Alembert's having been
offended that Rousseau should have attributed the letter of the King of Prussia to himself
(D'Alembert).

191

16 M. B. FINCH" AND E. ALLINSON PEERS

into the Correspondance litteraire. The pretext on which he addressed
Walpole we know; as to the motive we can hazard a plausible guess.
He writes then to congratulate the author of the Historic Doubts on
Richard III on having adopted an attitude of skepticism in treating
of his subject — an attitude which he, Voltaire, has long been preach-
ing as the only safe one for the historian to adopt.1 Perhaps Walpole
will be so kind as to send him a copy of the book itself, though the
only claim he can urge is his desire to instruct himself further.

So far so good; but in 1767 there had appeared a French trans-
lation of The Castle of Otranto, a poor one according to Walpole,2
though Grimm3 praises the elegance and correctness of the translator,
I'infatigable M. Eidous — le fatal M. Eidous, as he calls him in less
nattering vein elsewhere. Grimm hardly knew what to make of the
story itself; he found it difficult to admire, but succeeded in explain-
ing the fact away with the one reflection which of all others was most
calculated to rouse the wrath of the lord of Ferney — "il ne faut pas
juger les ouvrages de M. Walpole comme ceux d'un e*crivain de
profession, mais comme des objets d'amusement et de delassement
d'un homme de qualite*." Even a philosopher, he continues, could
not but shudder at the monstrous helmet, the giant sword, the walk-
ing picture, the hermit's skeleton, though "il est vrai que, quand on
a lu cela, il n'en re*sulte pas grand'chose."4

It was from the Preface attached to the second edition that great
things did result, as both Grimm and Mme du Deffand had from
the beginning prophesied that they would.5 Walpole replied to his
old friend's remonstrances with a warm defense of his Castle — "de

1 " II y a cinquante ans, que j'ai fait voeu de douter. J'ose vous supplier, Monsieur,
de m'aider a accomplir mon vceu! Je vous suis peut-6tre inconnu, quoique j'aie 6t6
honorg autrefois de I'amitig of the too brother [i.e., of Sir Robert and his brother old
Horace]" (Voltaire to Walpole, June 6, 1768).

* Short Notes of My Life (March, 1767).

• Grimm, op. cit., letter of February 15, 1767.

« The British Museum copy of the second edition has pasted inside the cover a cutting
from the St. James' Chronicle, which gives the English view — a piece of verse to the author
signed "Philotrantus." The second stanza runs:

"By thee decoy 'd, with curious Fear
We tread thy Castle's dreary Round'
Though horrid all we see and hear.
Thy Horrors charm while they confound."

8 " J'aurais voulu qu'on eut supprimS la preface ... il y est lu que Shakespeare a
beaucoup plus d'esprit que Voltaire; ce trait vous met §, 1'abri de la critique de Freron,
mais ne peut manquer de vous en attirer bien d'autres" (Mme du Deffand to Walpole,
March 8, 1767).

192

WALPOLE'S RELATIONS WITH VOLTAIRE 17

tous mes ouvrages ... 1'unique oil je me sois plu" — which will, he is
convinced, find admirers enough when the reign of taste shall super-
sede that of philosophy. As for Voltaire, he seeks no quarrel with
him, but he will maintain to the death the superiority of Shakespeare.1

A study of the Preface itself hardly bears out these pacific assur-
ances. Walpole begins by explaining that his novel was "an attempt
to blend the two kinds of Romance, the ancient and the modern.

.... My rule was Nature That great master of nature,

Shakespeare, was the model I copied." It is from the speeches of the
gravediggers in Hamlet, the rough jests of the citizens in Julius
Caesar that he has learned how a contrast between the sublimity
of the heroes and the naivete of the servants will enhance the effect
of the whole. But — and we feel at once how forced is the transition
and how unnecessary the reference — Voltaire declares, in his edition
of Corneille, that this mixture of buffoonery and solemnity is intoler-
able; well, "Voltaire is a genius — but not of Shakespeare's mag-
nitude." To refute him, Walpole will appeal to his own opinions,
expressed when he was speaking without prejudice. In the Preface
to the Enfant Prodigue ("that exquisite piece of which I declare my
admiration, and which, should I live twenty years longer, I trust I
shall never attempt to ridicule"2), he says of comedy: "On y voit un
melange de serieux et de plaisanterie " ; and surely this must apply
to tragedy equally well. Again, "in his epistle to Maffei, prefixed
to Merope, he delivers almost the same opinion, though I doubt not
with a little irony."

This, though unnecessary, is not offensive; we may wonder what
Voltaire is doing in this galley, but, renouncing the attempt to dis-
cover how he came there, we must agree that his captor has treated
him with all due courtesy. Not so in the footnotes, however;
Walpole's pages, like Gibbon's, carry their sting in their tail. " The
following remark," he has the grace to admit, "is foreign to the present

1 This reply to Mme du Deffand's letter of March 8 is quoted by Miss Berry in a
note to her edition of the Letters of Mme du Deffand. Walpole, afraid of the publication of
his letters to Mme du Deffand, had insisted on her returning or destroying them; she
burned many in 1778; the rest she had sent to England by Conway in 1775. These
last were apparently destroyed by Miss Berry in accordance with Walpole's will.

2 This is a hit at Voltaire's change of opinion over Shakespeare. "The French critic
has twice translated the same speech ("To be or not to be"] from Hamlet, some years
ago in admiration, latterly in derision; and I am sorry to find that his judgment grows
weaker, when it ought to be farther matured."

193

18 M. B. FINCH AND E. ALLINSON PEERS

question "—but this does not prevent him from making it. May not
"the .severe criticisms of so masterly a writer as Voltaire on our
immortal countryman" have been "the effusions of wit and pre-
cipitation, rather than the result of judgment and attention ? May
not the critic's skill in the force and powers of our language have
been as incorrect and incompetent as his knowledge of our history ?
Of the latter his own pen has dropped glaring evidence."1 Walpole
too, we see, could on occasion be "a venomous insect."

Such was the Preface. It seems difficult to believe that Voltaire
had not heard of it; Mme du Deffand's circle, which included many
of his correspondents, was discussing it with dismay, Grimm had
called special attention to it in reviewing Eidous' translation, and,
even supposing that his dearest friends had preferred not to hurt
his feelings by referring to it, his dearest enemies, and they were
many, were no doubt enchanted to repair the omission. What more
natural than that Voltaire, ever quick to resent a fancied insult,
much more such a real one as the Preface contained, should have
used his slight though perhaps genuine interest in Richard III as a
pretext for joining battle with its author about this later work?

Whatever Voltaire's motive in writing the letter on Richard III,
we may imagine the very mixed feelings with which Walpole received
it. His reply2 is certainly a masterpiece of tact, even down to the
delicate flattery implied by his writing it in English, not to mention
many compliments of a more direct and even fulsome nature.

Without knowing it, you have been my master, and perhaps the sole
merit in my writings is owing to my having studied yours; so far, Sir, am I
from living in that state of barbarism and ignorance with which you tax me
when you say que vous m'etes peut-etre inconnu. I was not a stranger to your
reputation very many years ago, but remember to have then thought you
honoured our house by dining with our mother — though I was at school, and
had not the happiness of seeing you.

Then, after more general remarks, comes his confession; in the
Preface to "a trifling romance, much unworthy of [his] regard," he
has found fault with some of Voltaire's remarks on Shakespeare.

iThe "evidence" could not well be more trivial. In his Preface to Thomas
Corneille's Essex, Voltaire shows that he does not realize that the Earl of Leicester and
Dudley were the same person.

2 June 21. 1768.

194

WALPOLE'S RELATIONS WITH VOLTAIRE 19

This romance he now proposes to send, and very cleverly does he
adopt the pose of the bluff and magnanimous Briton in doing so.

I might retract, I might beg your pardon; but having said nothing but
what I thought, nothing illiberal or unbecoming a gentleman, it would be
treating you with ingratitude and impertinence, to suppose that you would
either be offended with my remarks, or pleased with my recantation. You
are as much above wanting flattery, as I am above offering it to you.

By the same courier, Walpole wrote in much perplexity to
Mme du Deffand. His letter is of course lost, but we can judge of
its contents by the reply.1 No, says his mentor, he was right in not
speaking of his part in the Hume-Rousseau affair;2 and yes, he was
right in confessing to the Preface: " Je viens de me la faire relire, elle
est terrible; il n'est pas vraisemblable qu'il Tignore; mais s'il
Fignorait, il Papprendrait un jour, et en ce cas il est bon de le preVenir :
il y a de la noblesse et de la franchise dans ce precede"." But, adds
this shrewd old tactician, having confessed that the Preface exists,
why force Voltaire to read it ? Why not quietly forget to send it ?
Above all, why run the risk of entering upon an interminable literary
quarrel ?3 She wrote too to Mme de Choiseul at Chanteloup, asking
advice and sending copies of the letters, seeking thus to enlist a
powerful ally in the coming dispute.4

Voltaire's reply, an Art poetique in little, was written on July 15.
He praises Richard III,5 but devotes most of his attention to the
questions raised in the Preface, though he nowhere mentions it by
name and only in one or two instances replies to it point by point.

1 Letter of June 28. 1768.

2 Voltaire already knew of it from D'Alembert, who wrote on August 11, 1766.

a " II me vient a 1'esprit que, n'ayant rien a faire, il ne serait pas f§,ch§ de vous attirer
a une correspondance litteraire, qui se tournerait en discussion, en dispute, et lui donnerait
1'occasion de se venger de vous. Vous avez decid§ que Shakespeare avait plus d'esprit
que lui: croyez-vous qu'il le pardonne ? C'est tout ce que je peux faire, moi, de vous le
pardonner."

4 " Je trouve la franchise de M. Walpole envers Voltaire extrgmement noble. ...
mais pourquoi me dites-vous: Ne vous detachez pas de noire amif Vous savez combien
je suis disposee a aimer tous ceux qui vous aiment, et celui-la plus qu'aucun autre, parce
que son personnel me plait inflniment et que j'ai tres-bonne opinion de son coeur et de
son ame" (Mme de Choiseul to Mme du Deffand, July 6, 1768).

6 "Vous seriez un excellent attorney-general. Vous pesez toutes les probability's ;
mais il parait que vous avez une inclination secrete pour ce bossu. ... Je veux croire
avec vous que Richard III n'gtait ni si laid ni si mechant qu'on le dit; mais je n'aurais
pas voulu avoir affaire a lui. Votre rose blanche et votre rose rouge avaient de terribles
Spines pour la nation."

195

20 M. B. FINCH AND E. ALLINSON PEERS

Walpole, he not unreasonably complains, has tried to make the Eng-
lish believe that he despises Shakespeare:

Je suis le premier qui aie fait connaitre Shakespeare aux Franc, ais. ...
J'ai e"te" persecute' pendant trente ans par une mice de fanatiques, pour avoir
dit que Locke est THercule de la metaphysique. ... Ma destine^ a encore
voulu que je fusse le premier qui aie explique" a mes concitoyens les decouvertes
du grand Newton. ... J'ai 6t6 votre apotre et votre martyr; en verite" il
n'est pas juste que les Anglais se plaignent de moi.
For many years, he protests, he has been maintaining that Shake-
speare's genius was his own, while his faults were those of his period —
"c'est le chaos de la trage*die, dans lequel il y a cent traits de lumiere."
He admits that he has advocated, as Walpole declares, a mixture of
the serious and the comic in comedy; even that he has said that
"tous les genres sont bons, hors le genre ennuyeux." Granted:
"mais la grossierete* n'est pas un genre," and this even the Spaniards
are beginning to see. As to the unities, "vous n'observez, vous
autres libres Bretons, ni unite" de lieu, ni unite* de temps, ni unite*
d'action" — and the plays which result are none the better for it.

Walpole had attacked in his Preface the occasional flatness of
the style of Racine; Voltaire broadens the question by the sweeping
nature of his reply. Paris, he declares, is far superior to Athens for
comedy and tragedy alike : in the former, Moliere and even Regnard
have surpassed Aristophanes, while "toutes les tragedies grecques me
paraissent des ouvrages d'ecoliers, en comparaison des sublimes
scenes de Corneille, et des parfaites tragedies de Racine." And the
standard of taste is higher in Paris than at Athens; there the theater-
going public never exceeded ten thousand, and that including the
lower classes; here, above thirty thousand souls, all of them men and
women of culture, delight in the works of our great masters.

Walpole's last stricture had dealt with the French use of rhyme;
but, says Voltaire, Dryden used it, so why not Corneille and Racine ?
"C'est une difficult^ de plus." And he settles or evades the whole
question with one of those anecdotes that are true to life if not to fact:

Je demandais un jour a Pope pourquoi Milton n'avait pas rime* son
poe'me, dans le temps que les autres poetes rimaient leurs poemes, a 1'imitation
des Italiens; il me re"pondit: Because he could not.

And so, with a graceful compliment that ought to have made the
conscience-stricken Walpole wish he had never mentioned those
twin brethren, the Earl of Leicester and Dudley, the letter ends.

196

WALPOLE'S RELATIONS WITH VOLTAIRE 21

But now for the tracasserie that one comes to regard as almost
inevitable in Voltaire's "little wars." He is evidently out to make
mischief or at least to make a noise; accordingly, instead of sending
his letter direct to Walpole, he sends it to Mme de Choiseul, who
will pass it on to Mme du Deffand, who will finally send it to Eng-
land— at every stage in its journey, then, it will be read, admired,
discussed; and Voltaire sees in the discussion the germs of a very
pretty little international dispute. To make assurance doubly sure,
he sends Mme de Choiseul his own version of the affair,1 not knowing,
one imagines, that she had already been shown all the pieces of evi-
dence by Mme du Deffand. It certainly cannot have occurred to
him that she would take the drastic course of sending Walpole
his letter to her, together with the long, full-dress letter it had
covered.

There can be no doubt now, writes Mme du Deffand,2 as to the
intentions of Voltaire, and she repeats the advice she had given a
month before.

Au nom de Dieu, ne donnez point dans ce panneau; tirez-vous de cette
affaire le plus poliment qu'il vous sera possible, mais eVitez la guerre; c'est
le sentiment et le conseil de la grand' maman [Mme de Choiseul]; c'est celui
du grand abbe" [Barthelemy], et par-dessus tout, c'est le mien; je suis bien
sure aussi que ce sera le votre.

It was; the Choiseul letter shocked Walpole as much as his friends
had anticipated — all the more, no doubt, because he himself had not
found it easy to be straightforward with this treacherous antagonist.3

i "MADAME,

" La femme du protecteur est protectrice. La femme du ministre de la France pourra
prendre le parti des Francais centre les Anglais avec qui je suis en guerre. Daignez juger,
Madame, entre M. Walpole et moi. II m'a envoye ses ouvrages dans lesquels il Justine
le tyran Richard trois, dont ni vous ni moi ne nous soucions gu&re. Mais il donne la
preference §, son grossier bouflon de Shakespeare sur Racine et sur Corneille, et c'est de
quoi je me soucie beaucoup.

"Je ne sais par quelle voie M. Walpole m'a envoye" sa declaration de guerre. II
faut que ce soit par M. le Due de Choiseul, car elle est tr6s-spirituelle et tres-polie. Si
vous voulez, Madame, etre m6diatrice de la paix, il ne tient qu'§, vous; j'en passerai
par ce que vous ordonnerez; je vous supplie d'etre juge du combat. ...

"Vous me trouverez bien hardi, mais vous pardonnerez a un vieux soldat qui combat
pour sa patrie, et qui, s'il a du gout, aura combattu sous vos ordres."

2 Letter of July 21, 1768.

» Walpole's reply to Mme du Deffand's letter of July 21, quoted by Miss Berry, says:
"Vous voyez la bonne f oi de cet homme-ia ! II me recherche, il me demande mon Richard,
et puis il parle comme si je m'etais intrigue a le lui faire lire. Sa vanite est blessee de ce
qu'on a ose lui donner un rival, et il a la faiblesse plus grande encore de vouloir le rejeter
sur la part qu'il prend a I'honneur de Corneille et de Racine."

197

22 M. B. FINCH 'AND E. ALLINSON PEERS

Accordingly he replies in a tone of ironical and overwhelming
politeness, thanking Voltaire for his letter, but declining further
controversy.

One can never, Sir, be sorry to have been in the wrong, when one's errors
are pointed out to one in so obliging and masterly a manner. Whatever
opinion I may have of Shakespeare, I should think him to blame, if he could
have seen the letter you have done me the honour to write to me, and yet
not conform to the rules you have there laid down. When he lived, there
had not been a Voltaire both to give laws to the stage, and to show on what

good sense those laws were founded But I will say no more on this

head; for I am neither so unpolished as to tell you to your face how much
I admire you, nor, though I have taken the liberty to vindicate Shakespeare
against your criticisms, am I vain enough to think myself an adversary
worthy of you. I am more proud of receiving laws from you than of con-
testing them.1

With his letter to Mme de Choiseul, Voltaire had even worse luck.
She sent no direct reply at all,2 and it was left for Mme du Deffand
to try to patch up a peace in which neither she herself nor any of
those concerned believed.

Though she had agreed with Walpole in condemning Voltaire's
letter to Mme de Choiseul, she had enthusiastically praised the letter
to Walpole himself,3 and had refused to commit herself as to the
rights of the case beyond temporizing with, "Tout ce que je sais,
c'est que Voltaire a raison et que vous n'avez pas tort."4 Thus
it was that when the Marechale de Luxembourg sent her a complete
set of Voltaire's new quarto edition she was able to reply with not
more than the average amount of insincerity, praising the answer
to the Preface as "a masterpiece of taste, good sense, wit, eloquence,
politeness, etc." But she was improvising rather too freely when
she continued:

M. de Walpole est bien converti: il faut lui pardonner ses erreurs passe*es.
L/orgueil national est grand dans les Anglais; ils ont de la peine a nous

i Letter of July 27, 1768.

* " Je crois que nous ferons bien de le laisser tranquille, car pour moi, je ne veux
point entrer dans une dispute litteraire. Je ne me sens pas en 6tat de tenir t£te a Voltaire,
puis 1'animad version des gens de lettres me paralt la plus dangereuses des pestes " (Mme de
Choiseul to Mme du Deffand, August 7, 1768) . Of. Mme du Deffand's letter to Walpole,
July 27, 1768, which speaks of "la reponse indirecte qu'elle lui avait faite en m'ecrivant."

* "C'est le dieu du style" (letter to Walpole of August 10, 1768).
« Letter to Walpole of August 23, 1768.

198

WALPOLE'S RELATIONS WITH VOLTAIRE 23

accorder la superiority dans les choses de gout, tandis que sans vous nous
reconnaitrions en eux toute supe'riorite' dans les choses de raisonnement.1

So far from Walpole's being converted, this very letter — one of those
brought to Strawberry Hill after Mme du Deffand's death in 1780 — •
bears a pencil note in his own hand to contradict this statement,
and adding that had he known he would certainly not have allowed
his well-meaning old friend to make it.

Mme du Deffand was, however, knocking at an open door. On
this occasion at least Voltaire seems to have borne no malice, possibly
because he was fully occupied at the moment by a very similar feud
with the President He*nault.2 Like a true philosopher, he turned the
affair to practical use, and quotes the Historic Doubts in two of his
works.3

Walpole took things more seriously: he could forgive neither
Voltaire's criticism of Shakespeare nor Voltaire's conduct toward
himself. Accordingly, when Lady Ossory sent him a copy of one of
these "honourable mentions," we find him coldly replying:

I saw long ago the passage your Ladyship took the trouble to transcribe.
To be cited so honourably by Voltaire would be flattering indeed, if he had
not out of envy taken pains to depreciate all the really great authors of his
own country, and of this; and what sort of judgment is that which decries
Shakespeare and commends me ?4

His indignation on reading Voltaire's letter to d'Argental5 on Letour-
neur's Shakespeare was extreme; he sends to Mason this "paltry

1 Letter to Voltaire of August 14, 1768.

2 Mme du Deffand to Walpole, October 5, 1768; Voltaire to Mme du Deffand,
January 4, 1769.

1 He says in his Preface to Don Pedre (a tragedy finished in 1774, though begun much
earlier, in which he takes the part of Pedro the Cruel of Castile against Henry of Tras-
tamara) : " II ne faut pas s'Stonner aprgs cela si les historiens ont pris le parti du vainqueur
centre le vaincu. Ceux qui ont e"crit 1'histoire en Espagne et en Prance n'ont pas 6t6
des Tacites; et M. Horace Walpole, envoyS d'Angleterre en Espagne [he is confusing the
"noble author" with his uncle Horace, Lord Walpole] a eu bien raison de dire dans ses
Doutes sur Richard III, comme nous 1'avons remarque" ailleurs: 'Quand un roi heureux
accuse ses ennemis, tous les historiens s'empressent de lui servir de t6moins.' " Voltaire
quotes the same maxim in Le Pyrrhonisme dans Vhistoire, chap, xvii (1768). In his
Essai sur les mceurs (definitive edition, 1756), he had already mentioned "I'ingSnieux
M. Walpole" when giving his account of the Wars of the Roses, in chaps, cxvi and cxvii.

< Letter to Lady Ossory, January* 7, 1777.

6 " Auriez-vous lu deux volumes mise'rables dans lesquels il [Letourneur] veut faire
regarder Shakespeare comme le seul modele de la veritable traggdie? II 1'appelle le
Dieu du Theatre ... il ne claigne pas nommer Corneille ou Racine: ces deux grands homines
sont seulement envelopp6s dans la proscription gSnSrale sans que leurs noms soient pro-
nonc6s. II y a d6j5, deux tomes d'imprim6s de ce Shakespeare, qu'on prendrait pour des
pieces de la Poire, faites il y a deux cents ans. ... Ce qu'il y a d'affreux, c'est que le monstre
a un parti en Prance, et pour comble de calamites, et d'horreur, c'est moi qui autrefois
parlai le premier de ce Shakespeare; c'est moi qui le premier montrai aux Francais
quelques perles que j'avais trouvSs dans son Snorme f umier, etc." (letter of July 19, 1776).

199

24 M. B. FINCH AND E. ALLINSON PEERS

scurrilous letter against Shakespeare, but it is not worth sending";
and explains: "I have a mind to provoke you, and so I send you this
silly torrent of ribaldry. May the spirit of Pope that dictated your
'Musseus,' animate you to punish this worst of dunces, a genius
turned fool with envy."1

The last of his references to Voltaire shows him still mindful of
the ancient grudge:

I .... was much pleased with the sight of both the letters of Voltaire

and Mr. Windham Both are curious in different ways. Voltaire's

English would be good English in any other foreigner; but a man who gave
himself the air of criticising our — and I will say the world's — greatest author,
ought to have been a better master of our language, though this letter and his
commentary prove that he could neither write it nor read it accurately and
intelligently.2

M. B. FINCH

E. ALLISON PEERS
CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND

» Letter to Mason, September 17, 1776.
» Letter to Warton, December 9, 1784.

200

THE GRAIL AND THE ENGLISH "SIR PERCEVAL "

Three Irish stories about "Finn and the Goblin " have been in
print for some years, but have never before been brought into con-
nection with Sir Perceval (Sp).1 The oldest and rudest of these
exists in eighth-century Irish, and is called "Finn and the Man in
the Tree":2

When the Fiana were at Badamair on the brink of the Suir, Ciildub the
son of Ua Birgge (Culdub mac hiii Birgge) came out of the sid (fairy-
knoll) on the plain of Femen (ut Scotti dicunt) and carried off their cooking
from them. For three nights he did thus to them. The third time however
Finn knew and went before him [the goblin] to the fairy-knoll on Femen.
Finn laid hold of him as he went into the knoll, so that he fell.

A fairy woman jammed Finn's finger between the door and post at
the entrance of the knoll.

Another form of the story belongs to the ninth century and is
called "How Finn Obtained Knowledge and the Death of the Fairy
Culdub":3

Every morning a man was told off to boil a pig for his [Finn's] day's
food. Now once Oisln was told off to boil it. When he deemed it done,
he passed it on the points of the fork over the litter into the hand of his
comrade. Then something clutched at it. It passed out. He ran after
it (the goblin) across the Suir, to wit, at Ath Nemthenn, across Ord, across
Inmain, across the Slope of the Ui Faelain up to the summit of the Fairy
Knoll on Femen plain. The door was shut after it when it had gone into
the fairy-knoll, and Oisfn was left outside. When the Fiana awoke, then
Oisin came. "Where is the pig?" said Finn. "Some one braver than I
has taken it," said Oisln.

On the next day Cailte took it. It was carried from him in the same man-
ner. However, he came (back). "Where is the pig?" said Finn. "I am
not braver than he from whom it was taken yesterday," said Cailte.

» The Acallam episode was mentioned by me in "The Bleeding Lance," PMLA,
XXV (1910), p. 4.

2 Edited and translated by Kuno Meyer, Rev. Celt., XXV (1904), 344 f. On the
date see Meyer, Fianaigecht, RIA, Todd Lee. Series, XVI (1910), p. xviii.

» Ibid., XIV (1893), 245 f. On the date see Fianaigecht, p. Jdx.
201] 25 [MODEBN PHILOLOGY, August, 1920

26 ARTHUR C. L. BROWN

"Who is to go now to boil it?" said Finn. "The younger thorn is
always the sharper." He went himself to boil it, his spear hafts in his left
hand, his other hand turning the pig on the points of the fork. Something
clutched at it. Finn gave it (the goblin) a blow, but the point of his lance
only reached its back. However, it left its load outside. It went into

Ely, into Cell Ichtair Lethet Seven times it jumped across the

guir He made a thrust at it as it was going into the fairy-knoll so

that thereby he broke its back. Finn stretched out his hand at the door-
post of the fairy-knoll (sid), so that the door was closed on his thumb. He
put it into his mouth, and heard their wail. "What is that?" they all
said. "Culdub has been killed!" "Who killed him?" said they. "Finn
O'Baiscne." They all wail.

These Irish stories are identical in their main features. In both,
Finn's company is injured by a goblin on successive occasions; in
both, Finn pursues the goblin and slays or fells him just as he is
entering the door of a fairy-knoll.

It appears that folk-tales were not written down by ancient
Irish scribes (or if written down were not preserved) unless they were
fitted into the history (or pseudo-history) of Ireland. It is Finn's
great name that has preserved the stories just outlined, and doubtless
the special reason why they were written down was because in the
accident at the door of the knoll1 they supplied a reason for Finn's
well-known gift of foretelling the future by chewing his thumb.

These stories are mnemonic outlines intended to be filled out by
the memory of the narrator. The tale of a spook, who, like the
harpies of classic story, carries off your dinner, is certainly older than
the eighth century, and was at first a floating bit of folk-lore ready
to be attached to any hero. It accords with immemorial fairy
belief still current in Celtic lands. Enchantment is not mentioned
in either story, but the underlying idea is doubtless that Finn's
company was enchanted by a hostile fairy just as in recently collected
tales about cows that give no milk until malevolent fairies are sub-

* Rev. Celt., XXV, 349. A more usual explanation attributes the power to Finn's
having tasted the salmon of wisdom, Macgnimartha Finn (§ 18) (quoted below). Refer-
ences to this miraculous gift abound in Finn stories: Cormac's Glossary, s.v. Ore Treith;
Fianaigecht, p. xix; Rev. Celt., XIII, 16, 21; Stokes, Festschrift, p. 10; Silva Gadelica,
II, 98, 106, 135, 147, 163, 168-69, 233, 247; Irische Texte, IV, 248 (cf. Stokes's note,
p. 288, 1. 1834); MacDougall, Folk and Hero Tales from Argyllshire (1891), pp. 58, 274.

This gift, which is mentioned in the oldest accounts, is a valuable bit of evidence
that Finn either was or became a marchen hero. The m&rchen formulas that resemble
the Finn story ("Aryan Expulsion and Return," "Fated-Prince," usually, Woods,
PMLA, XXVII, 527-30) (" Barensohn," always, Panzer, Studien zur Germ. Sagen-
geachichte, I [1910], 3) ascribe supernatural gifts to the hero.

THE GRAIL AND THE ENGLISH "SiR PERCEVAL" 27

dued.1 Probably only a destined hero armed with a magic spear
could break the enchantment. A tenth-century Irish poem informs
us that Culdub was slain by Finn with Fiacail's spear.2

What appears to be a pre-Finn form of the tale of "Finn and the
Goblin" is told both in the prose Dindshenchas, a collection which
did not take shape until the twelfth century,3 but which bristles with

1 For example in S. Morrison," The Silver Cup" in Manx Fairy Tales (1911), pp. 27 f.,
we read of a herd that gave no milk until their owner ended the enchantment by breaking
into a fairy-knoll and stealing thence a silver cup. Of. J. Curtin, Tales of the Fairies
(1895), pp. 19f.; Campbell, Popular Tales of the West- Highlands, II (1890), 47. A kindred
idea is that of a demon who spoils your feast. This occurs in Panzer's "Barensohn"
formula, op. cit., pp. 82-83 f., where snatching, defiling, or spitting demons are collected.
A spitting demon who spoils a meal occurs in a North Carolina negro tale printed by
Elsie Parsons, JAFL, XXX (1917), 179; cf. 186. An extraordinarily vivid tale where
a cat is the aggressor is given by Thos. Corser, Collectanea Anglo-Poetica, Part I (1860),
112 f., Chetham Society, from a pamphlet printed in 1584. Another kindred idea is that
of the demon hand; see Kittredge, Harvard Studies and Notes, VIII, 227-30. Haunted
houses may be compared; see C. Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Delusions, II (1841),
367; J. H. Ingram, The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain (1888);
A. Lang, Book of Dreams and Ghosts (1897), pp. 187 f.; J. Ashton, The Devil in Britain
and America (1896), p. 47; C. Crowe, The Night-Side of Nature (1850), p. 273; H. L.
Neligan, True Irish Ghost Stories (1914); Kittredge, "The Friar's Lantern," PMLA,
XV (1900), 435 f., and cf. C. H. Bompas, Folk-Lore of the Santal-Parganas (1909), p. 381.
(Many of these references are due to the kindness of Professor T. P. Cross.) Cf. the
idea of a meadow eaten down yearly on St. John's Day by supernatural beings, Dasent,
Popular Tales (1859), p. 78. This is a variety of what Woods (PMLA, XXVII, 553)
called "The Periodic Difficulty Theme." The Battle of Mag Mucrime, ed. Stokes, from
LL, Rev. Celt., XIII, 435 f ., tells how King Ailill killed fairies that destroyed his grass
and put his men to sleep with their magic song.

2 The text is printed in Fianaigecht, p. xxiii, and a translation by Meyer in Maclnnes,
Folk and Hero Tales (1890), notes, p. 405:

"Aed MacFidaig fell by the hand of Find,
From the spear of Fiacail Mac Conchenn,
For the love he gave to the maiden of Bri Eile.
By the same spear Find killed
Culdub Mac Fidga Forflnd."

* On the date see Fianaigecht, p. xxvii. The story called M6in Gae Glaias is No. 14
in the Rennes MS, and has been printed and translated by Stokes in Rev. Celt., XV (1894),
305-6:

" Gae Glas son of Luinde son of Lug Liamna was Fiacha Srabtine's champion. 'Tis
for him that the smith (goba) made the intractable spear. From the south Culdub son
of Dian went on the day of Hallowe'en (samain) to seek to slay some one, and he slew
Fidrad son of Dam Dub, from whom Ard Fidraid is called. Then Gae Glas went a-follow-
ing him and hurled at him the lance which the smith had made for him by magic, and it
passed through Culdub into the bog, and that lance was never found afterwards save
once, when Mael-Odran son of Dimma Cron, after he had been a year in the ground,

found it and slew therewith Aithechdae king of Hui Mail This lance was the

Carr of Belach Duirgen: 'tis it that would slay thirty bands. Thus it was with a fork
under its neck, and none save the Devil would move it. So long as the lance is with its
point southwards the strength of Conn's Half of Ireland will not be broken by Leinster."

The "Death of Maelodran" here referred to has been edited by Meyer, Anec. Ox.,
VIII, Med. and Mod. Series, Hibernica Minora (1894), 78-81. It indicates that a demon
was thought to dwell in the spear. This spear, because it is handed down as a talisman
and given a name "Carr, " resembles the spear of Lug, which is often mentioned in Irish
stories and has a name " Luin." See my " Bleeding Lance," PMLA, XXV, 18, 24, 56.

203

28 ARTHUR C. L. BROWN

older material, and in the verse Dindshenchas.1 The hero is Grey
Spear (Gae Glas), and he slays Ciildub with a cast of a spear in
revenge for a wrong, just as Finn slew Culdub in the stories already
outlined. Both here and in the later and fuller account of "Finn
and the Goblin," to be quoted presently from the Acallam, the
spear is a magic weapon. In both the deed was done on Hallowe'en.
It can hardly be fortuitous that in this story Fiacha Srabtine is the
patron of the hero, while in the Acallam Fiacha mac Congha plays
a similar part. Manifestly this story of Gae Glas is a variant of
"Finn and the Goblin." The essential elements are the slaying of a
supernatural foe by a magic spear.

A more complete form of the story of "Finn and the Goblin"
is told in the Acallam na Senorach. Since this collection of tales
exists in no MS older than the fifteenth century, it is necessary to
consider what evidence attests the existence in the twelfth century
of the tale in question.2

This evidence is, first, a precise mention of this Acallam in the
twelfth-century prose Dindshenchas, which establishes the existence
of at least some portion of the work at that time; and, second, some
verses in the twelfth-century poem3 of Gilla in Chomded, which
allude to the very story in question.

The passage in the Dindshenchas is as follows:4 "As Caelte
sang . . in Patrick's time for their diverse, marvellous Acallam
(colloquy), which they made on Ireland's topographical legends."
In the Acallam, as we know it, Oisin and Caelte are the sole survivors
of the Flana, and Caelte, just as the Dindshenchas declares, is the
principal narrator. He goes about Ireland with Patrick and tells
stories connected with the localities which they visit. The adjectives
"diverse" and "marvellous" fit exactly the extant medley of
wild and supernatural stories which Caelte tells. Additions were

1 Gwynn, Metrical Dindshenchas, " Royal Irish Academy, Todd Lecture Series," IX
(1906), 64-65. The story agrees with that in the prose except that the smith who made
the spear is given a name, " Aith."

2 The Acallam na Sendrach, or "Colloquy with the Ancients," may not have been
put into final form before the thirteenth or fourteenth century (see Meyer, Fianaigecht,
pp. xxx-xxxi), but there is no reason to think that it shows any traces of influence coming
from French romance.

» The poem is in LL, p. 1446, a MS older than 1150. It has been edited and trans-
lated by Meyer, Fianaigecht, pp. 46-51.

« Ed. Stokes, Rev. Celt., XV. 437-38, 45.

204

THE GRAIL AND THE ENGLISH "8ra PERCEVAL" 29

from time to time thrust into the main framework,1 but it is incred-
ible that the writer of these lines in the Dindshenchas did not know
at least some portion of the work which we now have.

The verses of Gilla in Chomded are as follows: "In the eighth
year of his (Finn's) life, when he was visiting Dathi's Tara, he
slew [Aillen]2 whose hand was full with candle .... with timpdn.
'A timpdn for sleep' say all, the practice at each Hallowe'en, a
customary deed; every year, lasting incitement, the candle was
burning brightly."

• The statements of these verses agree, as will be seen, exactly
with the details given in the Acallam.3 Both describe the incident
as Finn's first significant exploit, and locate it at Tara. Both
ascribe to an uncanny foe the two powers of fire and of music, and use
the same word for the musical instrument: the timpdn, which in
both charms men to sleep. Both relate that this foe made visits at
every Hallowe'en. No one can doubt that Gilla in Chomded knew
the episode of "Finn and the Goblin" substantially as we have it.
"Finn and the Goblin," therefore, belongs to the oldest portion of
the Acallam and existed in the twelfth century. The reader will
observe that the story centers round a talismanic spear which
resembles the Luin, a fairy weapon famous in Irish tradition. An
outline of the episode is as follows :4

(Caelte is speaking to Ilbrecc.) " That is the spear of Fiacha mac
Congha by means of which it was that at the first Finn son of Cumall
acquired chief command of Ireland's Fiana; and out of Finnachaidh's
green-grassed sid 'twas brought. For it was Aillen mac Midhna of
the Tuatha de Danaan that out of Carn Finnachaidh to the north-
ward used to come to Tara: the manner of his coming being with a
musical timpdn in his hand, the which whenever any heard he would

1 See Stokes, Irische Texte, IV, x-xii. Dr. Douglas Hyde has found "a second
equally long Acallam of different contents," Fianaigecht, p. xxxi. I have not been able
to examine this.

2 The name of the goblin is missing from the MS, but has been supplied by Meyer
from the Acallam. The context makes a reference to the story of " Finn and the Goblin ' '
certain. See Meyer, Fianaigecht, pp. 46-51.

3 The sole discrepancy is of no importance. According to the poem, at the tjime of
the adventure Finn was eight years old; according to the Acallam he was ten.

4 O'Grady's translation, Silva Gadelica, II, 142-44, corrected according to Stokes's
notes, Irische Texte, IV, 1 (1900), 287-88. Stokes edits the Irish text from four MSS,
pp. 47-50, 11. 1654-1771.

205

ARTHUR C. L. BROWN

at once sleep." Every year on Hallowe'en (samhairi) the fairy or
goblin used to come, lull everyone to sleep with his timpdn, and
then emit a blast of fire out of his mouth. "With his breath he
used to blow up the flame and so, during a three-and-twenty years'
spell, yearly burnt up Tara with all her gear. That was the period
when the battle of Cnucha was fought, in which fell Cumall son
of Trenmor "

"After the death of Cumall the chieftainship of the Fiana was
made over to the great-deeded Goll mac Morna, who held it for
ten years. But a son had been born to Cumall, which was Finn;
and up to the age of ten years he was (perforce) a-marauding and
a-trespassing. In this his tenth year Tara's Feast was made by
the king, Conn, the Hundred Fighter: and as all Ireland drank and
enjoyed themselves in the great house of the Midchuart," the youth
Finn appeared before them. "The king of Ireland looked at the
youth; for to him and to the others in the bruidhen the youth was
unknown." The king put his horn of state into the youth's hand
and inquired: "Whose boy is this?" "I am Finn mac Cumall
.... son to the warrior that formerly held the chieftainship of
the Fiana, and I am come to procure my friendship with thee."
So Conn took Finn into his service.

"Then with a smooth and polished drinking-horn that was in his
hand the king of Ireland stood up and said: 'If, men of Ireland, I
might find among you one that until the point of rising day upon the
morrow should preserve Tara that she be not burnt by Aillen mac
Midhna, his rightful heritage .... I would bestow on him.' "
After the others had refused the offer, Finn took it up, and Conn
gave securities that Finn if successful should receive his heritage.

After this "Fiacha mac Congha that to Finn's father Cumall had
been a young man of trust," without the knowledge of the sons of
Morna or anybody else, furnished Finn with "a certain spear of
deadly property and with which no devious cast was ever made."

Finn thereupon went out to defend Tara against the goblin.

It was not long before he heard a plaintive strain, and to his forehea
he held the flat of the spear-head and its point. Aillen began and played
his timpdn till he had lulled everyone else to sleep, and then to consume
Tara emitted from his mouth his blast of fire. But to this Finn opposed the

206

THE GRAIL AND THE ENGLISH "8ra PERCEVAL" 31

crimson fringed mantle which he wore so that the flame fell down through
the air carrying with it the fourfold mantle a twenty-six span's depth into
the earth ; whereby ard na teinedeh or "fire hill" is the name of that eminence.
.... When Aille'n was aware that his magical contrivance was all baffled he
returned to sidh Finnachaidh on the summit of sliabh Fuaid. Thither
Finn followed him and, putting his finger into the spear's thong as Aille'n
passed in at the door of the sid, delivered a well-calculated and successful
throw that entered Aille'n in the upper part of his back, and in form of a
great lump of black blood drove his heart out through his mouth. Finn
beheaded him, carried the head back to Tara and fixed it upon a stake.

To Aillen then his mother came and, after giving way to great
grief, went to seek a leech for him:

Come hither 0 she-physician of Amairtha: by Fiacha mac Congha's
spear, by the fatal mantle and by the pointed javelin, Aille'n mac Midhna is

slain! Alas! Aille'n is fallen Come hither out of [Benn] Boirche, 0

she-physician! .... Blithe was Aille'n mac Midhna of Sliabh Fuaid, nine
times he burnt up Tara!

After this victory over the goblin Conn gave Goll his choice,
either to quit Ireland or to lay his hand in Finn's, and Goll chose to
serve Finn. Finn received the chieftainship of the Fiana and held it
till he died. And it was by this spear "that Finn ever and always
had all his fortune, and the spear's constant original name was
birgha or ' spit-spear.'"

According to this longer account, the goblin is named Aillen, not
Culdub, and instead of carrying off a portion of a feast, he burns the
king's city. But Finn slays him with the spear of Fiacail just as he
did Ctildub, and in both cases the cast of the spear takes effect just as
the goblin is entering his fairy-knoll. In both cases the goblin has
made repeated visits, and only Finn is successful in conquering him.
The stories are essentially the same. Here as in the other stories
the spear is a talisman: "By means of this spear Finn ever and
always had all his fortune." Evidently all three forms of "Finn
and the Goblin" belong together, and are in fact variants of one
story.

XII

A comparison of the different forms of "Finn and the Goblin"
shows that the essential elements in the story are the recurrent
molestation of a feast by a malevolent fairy who is finally slain by

207

32 ARTHUR C. L. BROWN

a youthful hero with a marvelous spear. These are also the striking
features in the English Sir Perceval (Sp), as a summary of the romance
will make clear:

Sir Perceval the elder, father of the hero, frequents tournaments
where his bitterest opponents are the Red Knight and the Black.
The Red Knight by the aid of " wicked armour" kills him "in battle
and in fight." The mother Acheflour with the infant Perceval
and one maid goes to a forest, where she brings the boy up in igno-
rance of the way men fight. Of the father's belongings she takes
only a little "scottes spere." As the boy grows up he uses the
spear to kill birds and deer, which he brings to his mother. When
he is about fifteen years old, he meets in the forest three of Arthur's
knights. From them he learns about King Arthur. He runs down
a wild mare, mounts it, and rides home to his mother, telling her
that he is going to Arthur's court to be made knight. He carries
with him his father's spear, a ring that his mother gives him, and
sets out on the mare, having no bridle except a withy.

He finds a lady in a hall (we are told in another place that she is
wife to the Black Knight) and exchanges rings with her (we learn
later that the ring which he gets by exchange preserves the wearer
from death and wounds). King Arthur is seated at his Christmas
feast when the youth all roughly accoutered rides into the hall. The
boy does not know his name, but Arthur calls him "fair child"
and says that if he were well dressed he would resemble the elder
Perceval. At this moment the Red Knight enters, seizes a golden
cup from before the king, and rides away with it. Arthur says that
for fifteen years the Red Knight has done this and no one can stop
him unless it be Sir Perceval's son; "the books say that he shall
avenge his father's death." Arthur promises to reward the youth
with knighthood provided that he will strike down the Red Knight.
Arthur goes to fetch armor, but Perceval, without waiting, pursues
the Red Knight and slays him with a single cast of his "scottes
spere" that pierces him through the eye. Perceval covets the red
armor, but not knowing how to unlace it, tries to burn the Red
Knight's body out. Sir Gawain coming up shows Perceval how to
unlace the red armor and buckle it on. Perceval sends Gawain back
to Arthur with the golden cup. Perceval meets with the Witch

208

THE GRAIL AND THE ENGLISH "8ra PERCEVAL" 33

Mother who, because of the red armor, mistakes him for her son, the
Red Knight, and remarks that though he were slain, she could restore
him to life unless he were burned. Whereupon Perceval kills her
and burns her body likewise.

Perceval spends the night with an old man (who, as we learn
later, is his uncle). He hears from a messenger that Luf amour the
Queen of Maidenland is in trouble, and he sets off alone to rescue
her. He slays a "sowdan" named Gollerotherame who was besieg-
ing Maidenland and marries the rescued Lufamour. After a stay of
one year Perceval sets out to find his mother. In the forest he meets
a weeping lady who tells him that she is being punished by her
husband the Black Knight because she has lost her ring. Perceval
overcomes the Black Knight and reconciles him to the lady. Perce-
val finds that a giant, a brother of Gollerotherame, has driven his
mother to insanity by making her believe that he has killed her son.
He slays the giant, cures his mother by means of a drink which he
finds in the giant's house, and returns happily with her to Maiden-
iand.

The parallelism between Sp and the story of "Finn and the
Goblin" in the Accallam (A) may be summed up as follows: In
both, the scene is at the court1 of the king of the land and at a great
feast held at a yearly festival (Christmas or Hallowe'en) . In both,
the land has been enchanted since the slaying of the hero's father
by a supernatural warrior who has insulted and injured the king each
year at a festival. In both, the youthful hero is unknown at court,
but is recognized by the king. In both no one but the youthful
hero ventures to attack the supernatural foe. In both, the youth-
ful hero, who without knowledge of the court is equipped with a
spear furnished by a relative (mother or uncle), slays the enchanter
by a cast of his spear. In both, the enchanter or goblin has a

i Tara, the capital city of the Irish king, had been bewitched for twenty-three years,
we are told, although we read later that Finn was but ten years old, and that Aillen had
nine times burnt Tara, which seems to prove that the spell had lasted but ten years.
Sp has a similar discrepancy about the duration of the enchantment. Fifteen years
have elapsed since the Red Knight killed Perceval's father, and yet we read "Fyfe
jeres hase he pus gane" (633) (where Holthausen emends to "Fyftene"); and again
" Sythen taken hase he three [cups] " (637), which might mean that but three Hallowe'ens
had passed. Whatever explanation we may adopt for these inconsistencies, it is reason-
able to hold that in both narratives the enchantment must have rested upon the land
from the time when the hero's father was slain until the youthful hero, aided by his
father's magic arms, slew the enchanter.

209

34 ARTHUR C. L. BROWN

supernatural mother, and there is talk of a possibility of restoring
the enchanter to life.

In the Irish, Finn kills the goblin with the cast of a spear just
as the latter is entering his fairy-knoll. That the fairy man is slain
at the entrance to his subterranean dwelling is probably a primitive
idea. It occurs in all the Irish versions. In the English Sp a
rather distinct trace of this fairy-knoll remains. Perceval kills the
Red Knight with a cast of his father's spear at a hill. This might
at first appear an ordinary hill, but after Perceval has slain the Red
Knight and put on the armor, Gawain remarks: "Goo we faste fro
this hill .... it neghes nere nyghte" (806-8), which is a pointless
remark unless the hill be a fairy-knoll (sld), near which it would, of
course, be dangerous to tarry at night. It seems safe to conclude,
therefore, that the hill which is mentioned five times (697, 780, 806,
838, 845) is a surviving trace of the Red Knight's sid or fairy abode.
The spear with which Finn killed the goblin was given him by
his uncle Fiacail. Since the father, Cumall, had many treasures
and talismans,1 and since Fiacail had been to Cumall "a young man
of trust," this spear may have belonged to Finn's father; anyhow
it was a talismanic spear that brought good luck, and it came from
fairyland. The spear in Sp was the only one of the father's belong-
ings that was carried away by the mother to the forest and given to
the son. It is not definitely called a talisman, but the progress of the
action makes this a highly probable conjecture.

The scene in the Irish where King Conn, after complaining of the
yearly depredations of his uncanny foe, offers to restore to any man
who will ward off this enemy his rightful heritage (in Finn's case, of
course, the command of the Fiana) is like that in Sp, where Arthur
after complaining of the yearly ravages of the Red Knight offers to
make Perceval a knight (that is, to receive him into the company of
the warriors) provided that he recover the cup from the Red Knight.

'Als I am trewe king,' said he,

'A knyghte sail I make the,

For-thi }>ou wille brynge mee

The coupe of golde bryghte.' 648.2

» See John McNeill, Dunaire Finn, pp. 21 f., 34 f., 119 f., 135 f.
* There is no parallel in A to the recovery of the cup. When the king stood up to
speak to Finn, he held "a polished drinking-horn in his hand."

210

THE GRAIL AND THE ENGLISH "8ra PERCEVAL" 35

The central incident in Sp appears then to belong to what may
be called the "Finn and the Goblin" type. In Sp, however, the
"Goblin" incident is a part of an enfances framework. Now a
"Goblin" episode as a part of an enfances framework occurs in an
Irish story, the Macgnimartha Finn (M),1 the resemblance of which
to Sp is so close that it has been noticed repeatedly. M owes its
preservation, no doubt, to the fact that it was told as heroic saga
and was made a part of the supposed history of Finn. In the process
of adapting it to history the marvelous elements out of which it has
been built up have become obscured, but a little study of it will
reveal that it belonged originally to the group of enfances feeriques.
The importance of M has not been hitherto generally recognized
because of the accident that it exists in no MS older than the fifteenth
century. Before the recent advances in Irish scholarship it was
usually referred to as a fifteenth-century tale.2 One could urge,
therefore (if he were sufficiently resolute), that it might be a decayed
and confused version of French Arthurian romance; that it might
possibly be a last stage of deterioration from literary forms, rather
than a genuine survival of the living folk-tale out of which as a germ
literary Arthurian romances grew. Any hypothesis of this sort is
now shown to be impossible because of the evidence that M was
in existence substantially in its present form in the twelfth century,
and is therefore too old to be explained by French romance.

Twenty years ago students of Irish were not sufficiently sure of
the history of grammatical forms to assert that an Irish saga text
was ancient unless it was contained in LU (a MS written before
1106),3 or in LL (a MS of 1150). The development of Irish scholar-
ship has now made it certain that many texts which exist solely
in later MSS belong almost or quite in their present form to the
twelfth century or earlier. Evidence has been accumulating that

1 " The Youthful Exploits of Finn." which exists in a MS of 1453, but is declared to be
a copy of older documents. It has been edited by Meyer, Rev. Celt., V (1881-83), 195-
204; cf. his corrections, Archiv f. Celt. Lex., I, 482 ; and translated by him, Eriu, I (1904),
180-90. On its resemblance to Sp, see Nutt, Folk-Lore Record, IV (1881), 9 f.; Studies
on the Legend of the Holy Grail (1888), pp. 152 f.; Griffith, Sir Perceval, Chicago disserta-
tion, 1911.

2 E.g., Nutt, Folk and Hero Tales, ed. Maclnnes (1891), p. 415.

8 Compare my procedure in 'Twain," Harvard Studies and Notes, VIII (1903) 27 f.
On L U see Kittredge, A Study of Gawain and the Green Knight (1916), pp. 290 f.

211

36 ARTHUR C. L. BROWN

M,1 though in a fifteenth-century MS, and though the language con-
tains some later forms, is in truth one of these older texts. Professor
Kuno Meyer, the latest editor of M , entirely without reference to its
possible relations to Sp, unhesitatingly declares it to be a composition
of the twelfth century.2 We shall see that several Irish texts which
exist in twelfth-century MSS, notably the Fotha Catha Cnucha? and
a poem beginning A Ri richid by Gilla in Chomded,4 establish this
dating beyond a doubt. Taken together they indicate a knowledge
in the twelfth century of most of the incidents of M. I will print
summaries of these two important twelfth-century texts in parallel
to a summary of M,5 so that in the case of each incident the guaranty
for its existence in the twelfth century may be clear at a glance. The
Fotha Catha* ends before the point at which Gilla in Chomded's
poem begins so that both can be arranged in one column.

The following table will also serve another purpose. By printing
a summary of Sp in a third column all incidents which are parallel
in Sp and M appear, and the extent to which these incidents can
be proved to have been known in the twelfth century becomes
apparent.

1 For references see an article by Professor Pace in PMLA, XXXII (1917), 598-604.
To Pace's materials I am able to add the evidence of two twelfth-century Irish documents,
and partly by the help of these documents I believe it possible to show that the number
of incidents common to Sp and M is nearer twelve than seven, the number which he
observed. Pace's article is one of promise, and I regret to note his recent death while on
military relief work in Prance.

2 Fianaigecht (1910), p. xxviii. Long since Meyer asserted that the presence of
Old-Irish forms fixes the date of a text. Even if we were to assume that some later
scribe had tried to deceive us, his knowledge would have been insufficient to enable
him to insert genuine Old-Irish grammatical forms. The later scribes had a desire to
change grammatical forms of the older language into modern forms, but "few had suffi-
cient knowledge of the older language to enable them to do so correctly. The later the
period, the less Old-Irish was understood, the greater their difficulties of dealing intelli-
gently with extinct forms," Meyer, Anec. Oxon. (1894), VIII, viii. " I think that if in a
late copy we find among modern surroundings Old-Irish forms almost or entirely un-
changed occurring with any frequency we may safely assume that we have then a copy
which is ultimately derived from an Old-Irish source," ibid., p. x. The researches of
Strachan, Transactions of the Philological Society, 1894 ff., are of fundamental importance
for the dating of Irish texts.

» "Cause of the Battle of Cnucha," which has been edited and translated from LU
by Hennesey, Rev. Celt., II (1873-75), 86 f., and has been edited by Windisch, Kurzge-
fasste Ir. Gram. (1879), pp. 121 f. Of. also Meyer, op. cit., p. xxv. The Fotha Catha is
told, not as heroic saga like M, but as veritable history, and all traces of the marvelous
have been removed.

4 Edited and translated by Meyer, op. cit., pp. 46-51.

* From Meyer's translation, Eriu, I (1904), 180-90.

• From Hennessy's translation. Rev. Celt., II, 91 f. I give the section numbers of
the editors named.

212

THE GRAIL AND THE ENGLISH "SiR PERCEVAL "

Fotha Catha

Cumall fought a
battle against Ur-
griu and Aed son
of Daire derg (also
called Morna).
Cumall was slain
by Aed. The
latter lost an eye
by the spear of
Luchet, and was
thereafter called
Goll.

(One stanza of a
poem almost ex-
actly as in M.)

Muirne bore a
son called Demni
(later called Finn).
The boy was
nursed up secretly
"in the house of
Fiacail mac Con-
chind .... for a
sister to Cumall
was Fiacail's wife,
Bodball Ben-
dron."

§§ 1 and 2

Cumall mac Tre*nm6r was slain
in the battle of Cnucha by Aed
who lost an eye by the spear of
Luchet and was thereafter called
Goll (i.e. the one-eyed).1 Goll
was son of Daire derg (the Red),
also called Morna, and he dis-
placed Cumall as captain of the
fian. "The man who kept
Cumall's treasure-bag wounded
Cumall in the battle." Another
foe was Urgriu.

§3

(Verses describing the fight.)

§4

After the battle Cumall's wife
Muirne bore a son Demne (later
called Finn). Two women-
warriors (dd banfeindig), Bod-
bmall bandrai* and the Grey One
of Luachair (in Liath Luachra)*
with the help of Fiacail mac
Conchinn carried away the boy,
for the mother "durst not let him
be with her." The two women-
warriors brought up the boy
secretly in the forest of Slieve

The elder Perce-
val, father of the
hero, was "Slayne
in batelle and in
fighte"bytheRed
Knight (161-62).

(Perceval was
bom before his
father's death
101-4).

P. was carried
by his mother and
one maid to a
wood and there
reared (163 f.).

1 Aed means "fire." "Fire son to Daire the Red" may plausibly be the origin of
the Red Knight in Sp. Aed was a common Irish name, but it may have been common
because men were named after a demi-god. Cf. Cormac's Glossary, a.v. Aod, Anecdota
from Irish MSS, IV, 4, 33. According to Plummer, Vitae Sanctorum, Hib., I, xxviii, the
life of St. Aed shows traces of borrowings from a fire-deity. (The saint's qualities,
however, might have been suggested solely by his name.)

2 She evidently corresponds to Bodball Bendron hi the Fotha Catha. Bendron is
perhaps to be emended to bandrai, "sorceress." The Fotha Catha reveals the fact that
Fiacail was Finn's uncle. A twelfth-century poem by Gilla Modutu in LL printed in
Fianaigecht, p. xxix, calls Bodball "Finn's foster-mother (o mummi maith).

3 This person is a woman, and cannot be identical with Liath Luachra, a warrior
who, intrusted with Cumall's treasure bag, wounded Cumall in the battle, and was later
slain by Finn.

213

ARTHUR C. L. BROWN

Fotha Catha

Gilla in Chomded'a
poem

§§2-4

Glaisdic was
[Finn's] name
originally. The
sons of Morna
named him Finn.

M Sp

§4

Bloom. ' ' That was indeed neces-
sary for many a sturdy stalwart
youth and many a venomous
hostile warrior and angry fierce
champion .... of the sons of
Morna were lying in wait for that

boy."

§5

After six years the mother
Muirne passed through one
wilderness to another until she
visited her son in the forest of
Slieve Bloom. She was "afraid
of the sons of Morna for him."
She left him in charge of the
women-warriors, bidding them
take charge of the boy till he
should be fit to be a warrior.

§6

Finn went hunting alone and
"cut off at a shot the feathers and
wings " of a duck upon a lake.

§7

He was for a time in the house
of Fiacail mac Codna, but the
two women-warriors carried him
away with them again.

§8

He entered a game of hurley
against a band of youths.

§§9 and 10 King Arthur

They called him Finn ("the caUs him, "Faire

fair")1 on account of his shapeli- childe and free"

ness. (501-6).

shot
(217-

Perceval
small birds
24).

Perceval
not know his
name: "I ame
myn awnn modirs
childe."

* That the parallel to Sp at this point is significant is proved by the occurrence of
something similar to the name "the fair" in almost all stories of the sort: In Chretien
the mother calls her son "Biax fllz" (353); in Bl, "Biaus fius" (ed. Potvin, 1232); in
Wolfram, "bon fiz, scher «z, b6a fiz" (113, 4; 140, 6); in Li Biaus Desconeus, "biel
fll," vs. 117; in Libeaua Deaconus, "Beau fls" (ed. Kaluza, vss. 26, 66); in Meriadeuc,
"le biel vallet" (10774); in the Prose Lancelot, "le biau trove," etc. (ed. Sommer, III,
22). In the Enfancea Gauvain the boy is called "bel fll." Romania, XXXIX, 22, 2d
frg. 32.

THE GRAIL AND THE ENGLISH "Sin PERCEVAL"

Gilla in Chomded

"Seven years he
was in hard plight,
under Loch Ree
he found 'fair
help'1 (findcho-
bair)." "Finn's
first race ....
into Loch Corrib
from Loch Ree
around Con-
naught."

§11

He ran a race
with the deer of
Fiaclach mac Con-
chenn.

§16

Seven deer by
Slieve Bloom was
Finn's first chase,
. . . . a brave and
stout exertion.

§28

"Thirty jewels
.... Finn took
out of the jaws
of the crane-bag,
after he had slain
Glonna2 at the
vast ford, and
Liath Luachra of
the swift deeds."

§H

He found the youths swimming.
"He jumps into the lake to them,
and drowns nine of them in
the lake." People said, "Finn
drowned the youths," so that
henceforth the name Finn clave
to him.

§12

Once a "fleet herd of wild
deer" was seen by him, and he
ran down two bucks among them,
and brought them to the two
women-warriors. He was hunt-
ing in this wise till one day the
women-warriors said to him,
"Go now from us for the sons of
Morna are watching to kill thee."

§13

After this he took service with
the King of Bantry, and no
hunter was his equal. And the
king said, "If Cumall had left a
son one would think thou wast
he."

§14

A similar incident occurred
while he was in service to the
King of Kerry.

§15

A chief smith named Lochan
made two spears for him, and
with one of them he slew a famous
sow and brought the head for a
bridal gift to the smith's daughter.

§16

A weeping woman told Finn
that her son Glonda had been

" >er wes no beste
J?at welke one fote,
To fle fro hym was
it no bote, When
}>at he wolde hym
have" (222-24).

He saw a group
of wild mares, ran
down the biggest
and rode on it to
his mother (325-
64).

Arthur thinks
if he were well
dressed he would
resemble the elder
Perceval.

"And ever more
trowed hee, J>at J>e
childe scholde bee
Sir Percy veil son"
(545-88).

Perceval found
a weeping woman

In the eighth slain by "a tall, very terrible tied to a tree by
year of his life warrior." Finn "went in pur- her husband the

1 " Findchobair" may be a name for Finn's foster-mother or mumme.

2 The Irish (iar n-guin Glonda) merely says "after the slaying of Glonna and Liath
Luachra" and need not necessarily contradict M, according to which Liath Luachra
slew Glonna.

215

ARTHUR C. L. BROWN

Gilla in Chomded

§5

when he was visit-
ing Dathi's Tara,
he slew [Aille*n]
whose hand was
full with candle
.... with tim-
pdn.

§6

" 'A timpdn for
sleep,' said all, the
practice at each
Hallowe'en a cus-
tomary deed,
every year."

§8

"For fear of
sword-fierce Conn
Finn went to learn
noble poetry. Ce-
thern mac Fintain
was his tutor in
poetic composi-
tion."

"After a feast
the fiana bring
Finn to avenge
the poet Grebe"!,
the fairy woman
from Slieve Sla" nga
had achieved the
fierce, bold deed

this was

his journey on that
night from Bri
Ele."

§13

"In revenge of
the poet Grebe"!
Finn slew Ua Fid-

§16

suit of the warrior, and they
fight a combat, and he fell by
him. This is how he was : he had
the treasure bag with him, to
wit the treasures of Cumall. He
who had fallen there was Liath
Luachra ("The Grey One of
Luachair") who had dealt the
first wound to Cumall in the
Battle of Cnucha."

§§ 17-19

Finn visited Crimall mac Tre*n-
m6r [his uncle] . He went to learn
poetry from Finne*ces on the
Boyne, and he tasted the salmon
of wisdom. "He durst not
remain in Ireland else, until he
took to poetry, for fear of the son
of Urgriu, and of the sons of
Morna."

§20

(A poem by which Finn proved
his skill.)

§21

Finn went to Cethern mac Fin-
tan further to learn poetry with
him. They both went to woo a
maiden in the fairy-knoll of Bri
Ele. Every year at Hallowe'en
the fairy knolls of Ireland were
open, and every Hallowe'en a
man of Ireland went to woo this
maiden, but it always happened
that some man belonging to the
wooer's company was slain.

§22

As Finn and Cethern went
toward the fairy-knoll, Oircbel
the poet, one of their people was
slam.

216

Black Knight. He
overcame the
Black Knight
(1817-1932).

He slew the Red
Knight not know-
ing that he was the
one who slew his
father (629-40,
689-92, 709).

THE GRAIL AND THE ENGLISH "Sra PERCEVAL"

Gilla in Chomded

§13

ga . . . with the
spear of Fiaclach
mac Conchind."

§14

"Two staves
Finn heard."

§15

"'Venom is the
spear ' was the
powerful begin-
ning of the second
stave .... there
after the deed of
valour on bright
Allhallowe'en he
heard them."

§17

"A vessel full of
gold, of glorious
silver, the woman
out of Slieve Sldn-
ga gave to him;
we know for cer-
tain that this was
the first fair treas-
ure that he took to
the fian for noble
distribution."

§23

Finn was angry and went to the
house of Fiacail for advice.
Fiacail gave Finn a spear and
told him to watch the fairy
mounds on Hallowe'en.

§24

Finn watched until the fairy-
knoll opened, cast Fiacail's spear,
and killed a fairy-man, Aed mac

Fidga.

§25

Finn heard the fairies lament
and repeat a quatrain, "Venom
is the spear," etc.

§26

Finn recovered his spear by
seizing a fairy-woman as hostage
for its return.

§27

Finn vied with Fiacail1 his
uncle in feats of strength.

§28

Fiacail set Finn to watch ask-
ing to be waked if he heard any
(cry of) outrage. Finn heard a
cry in the night, and did not
wake Fiacail, but pursued alone
and overtook three fairy-women
outside the green mound of Slieve
Slanga. He snatched a brooch
from one of them. She asked
back her brooch, and promised a
reward. (The sentence is incom-
plete and the conclusion is sup-
plied by Meyer from the poem
of Gilla in Chomded [§ 17].)

Perceval spent
the night with his
uncle who was the
father of nine sons
(936 f., 1050).

Perceval sent
back his three
cousins on some
pretext, and trav-
eled on alone to
an adventure
(1033 f.).

He won the love
of Lufamour in
Maidenlande
(1221-1815).

i From the Fotha Catha we learn that Fiacail was Finn's uncle by marriage. In 17-19
above, Finn visited Crimall, his father's brother. In Sp the hero visited Arthur and
the old man with nine sons. Both were uncles. In Peredur the hero visited two uncles
in succession and engaged in feats of arms. In Chretien Gornemans is an uncle and he
taught the use of arms. Clearly an uncle who teaches the hero skill in arms is a part of
the story formula we are studying.

217

42 ARTHUR C. L. BROWN

This table shows that most of the events in M are attested by
texts which exist in twelfth-century MSS. It shows further a
remarkable parallelism between M and Sp. First it may be well to
observe that M contains some episodes that correspond to nothing
in Sp. These are: the visit of the mother1 (5); the hero's stay as a
child with his uncle, and the game of hurley (7-9) ; his drowning nine
youths in a lake (11); his love affair with the daughter of Locan the
smith (15); his learning poetry, tasting the salmon of wisdom, and
his revenge on the fairy folk for slaying Oircbel the poet (17-26). It
is also true that a few incidents in Sp find no parallel in M: the
hero's encounter with the Red Knight's witch mother; his battle
with a second giant (Gollerotherame's brother, 2005 f.); and his
rescue of his mother. An enfances framework is meant to hold
episodes, and the insertion of a number of episodes into M, or the
omission of a few from Sp, in nowise invalidates the approximate
identity of the framework of the two stories. The significant fact
is that some twelve incidents are common to the older Irish and to
the English story. Since these incidents occur in the same order
in both2 the parallelism cannot possibly be fortuitous. The frame-
work of the two stories is the same.

Both the Irish M and the English Sp relate (1) that the hero's
father was slain in battle; (2) that he was reared far from men by
two women; (3) that he showed skill in killing birds; (4) that he
was swift enough of foot to run down wild animals; (5) that his real
name was concealed; (6) that a king suspects his identity; (7) that
he was called "The Fair One" (Finn), or "faire child"; (8) that he

1 In Li Biaus Desconeiis the mother visits the hero while he is with his fairy nurse,
so that this incident is probably original, and has been dropped in Sp.

2 The parallel to the youth's being called Finn ("the fair"), §§9-10, occurs at a
slightly later place in Sp, but is an idea that might have been mentioned more than once.
The only real transposition of incident is in § 16, where the weeping woman occurs
near the end of Sp, and the reason for it is clearly a difference in plot. Sp divides Liath
Luachra into two figures, a Red Knight and a Black, both enemies, whom the hero
encounters separately. The Black Knight is subdued but not slain. In M the hero
avenges at one stroke both the weeping woman and his father.

A tenth-century Irish poem, quoted above, p. 27, tells of two fairy foes, Aed mac
Pidaig and Culdub mac Fidga, who were successively slain by Finn with Fiacail's spear.
Gilla in Chomded likewise knows two foes, one a fire goblin, another the fairy man who
"was slam about the maiden of Bri Eile." In these goblin brothers (for Fidaig and
Fidga are probably the same patronymic) it is tempting to trace the origin of the Red
Knight and the Black Knight in Sp who were successively overcome by Perceval. Aed
means "fire" or "red." Cul dub means "black back."

218

THE GRAIL AND THE ENGLISH "SiR PERCEVAL" 43

avenged a weeping woman; (9) and avenged himself unwittingly on
a mysterious man who had killed or helped to kill his father; (10) that
he visited his uncle's house; (11) that he rid himself of the com-
panionship of his uncle, or his cousins, to go alone; (12) that he had
an adventure with a damsel at a fairy-knoll (" Maiden Land" in Sp).

All of these parallels are guaranteed by twelfth-century Irish
references except (3), (8), and (11). No. (3) certainly belongs to
the Irish enfances formula because it is one of the exploits of the
youthful Cuchulinn.1 No. (8), although Gilla in Chomded
does not mention the significant detail of the weeping woman, was
almost certainly known to him.2 His statement, " Thirty jewels
Finn took out of the crane-bag after the slaying of Glonna and
Liath Luachra," agrees precisely, as far as it goes, with M. Because
of this exact agreement one can hardly go wrong in assuming that
the omission of the weeping woman is a mere accident occasioned by
the laconic style of the poet. No. (11) is, probably, the sole parallel
left without guarantee. Its omission would not perceptibly weaken
our evidence.

No argument is needed to establish the existence of a literary
connection between Irish and English. The parallelism is too com-
plete to be fortuitous. Furthermore this parallelism extends beyond
mere folklore to details that appear to be the work of literary
elaboration. Compare, for example, the speech of the King of
Kerry in the Irish to that of King Arthur in the English (in both
Irish and English the king is addressing a youthful hero whose
identity is unknown). The King of Kerry says:

"If Cumall had left a son, one would think thou wast he."
(M, § 13). King Arthur says:

And }>oii were wele dighte,
K>u were lyke to a knighte,
J>at I lovede with all my myghte,
Whills he was one lyve. 548.

The changes that appear in the English version are exactly of the
sort that one might expect the author of a romance of chivalry to

1 Cuchulinn killed a swan. See Windisch, Irische Texte, extraband (1905), p. 163.

2 Poets assume that their hearers understand allusions, and the problem of restoring
a folk-tale from references to it in Middle-Irish poems is something like what it would
be, e.g., to restore the classical tale of Arethusa from Milton's allusions to it in Lycidas.

219

44 ARTHUR C. L. BROWN

make. The emphasis placed on good clothes ("wele dighte") is to
be noted as showing that the English version is addressed to a differ-
ent state of society from that in which the Irish arose.

In both Irish and English the hero leaves his uncle to go alone
to an adventure with a fairy woman. In the Irish we read:

"Finn did not wake the warrior. He went alone" (M, § 28).
The English version runs:

Ever he sende one a-gayne

At ilke a myle ende,
un-till J?ay ware all gane;
J?an he rydes hym allane. 1042.

Some significant connection between Irish and English is indi-
cated by the way in which most of the personages in the English
may be matched by like personages in the Irish, and this correspond-
ence extends in the case of several of the chief personages even to
names. "Faire child" is a good translation of Finn ("the fair");
the Red Knight must be connected in some way with Aed mac Daire
Dearg ("Fire, son of Daire the Red"), and Gollerotherame the
giant shares the first part of his name with Goll mac Morna, about
whom in Irish story the tradition of giant size especially clung.1

i The Fiona were all regarded as of great stature, but Goll's gigantic size was espe-
cially well known, being referred to even by writers of English. Dunbar (before 1520)
speaks of "mekle Gow McMorne" as a giant (ed. Small, II [1893], 317). Gavin Douglas
(before 1513) in his "Palice of Honour" has the lines:

Greit Gowmakmorne, and Pyn Makcoul, and how
Thay suld be goddis in Ireland, as thay say (ed. Small, I [1874], 65).
Barbour in his Bruce (1375) refers to "Gol mak Morn" and "Fyngal" (ed. Skeat. STS,
Bk. Ill, 61). Hector Boece in his History of Scotland (1526) describes the giant size
of "Fyn son of heaven": "Pynnanum fllium coeli (Fyn mak Coul, vulgari vocabulo)
virum, uti ferunt, immani statura (septenum enim cubitorum hominem fuisse narrant)
Scotici sanguinis, venatoria arte insignem, omnitausque insolita corporis mole formidolo-
sum" (ed 1575, p. 128). Keating, the seventeenth-century Irish historian, thinks it
necessary to argue that Finn was not a giant (ed. Dinneen, II [1907], 330).

In post-twelfth-century development of the Finn saga, Goll as the leader of the
Claim Morna became very prominent, often overtopping Finn in interest, but I find no
mention of Goll mac Morna before the twelfth century. I conjecture that Goll ("blind"
or "one-eyed") was at first not a proper name, but a common epithet for any one-eyed
giant, or Fomorian. A good many giants named Goll figure in Middle-Irish literature;
in the twelfth-century prose Dindshenchas (Rev. Celt., XV, 323) "Goll glass" is a giant
who has a giantess daughter named "Gabal"; in the "Violent Deaths of Goll and
Garb" (Rev. Celt., XIV, 405 f., from LL) Cuchulinn slew a giant named Goll who had
one huge eye projecting from his head and another eye strangely sunken; Goll and Irgoll
were chieftains of the Fomorians in Cath Maige Tured (§ 128, Rev. Celt., XII, 97).
Another giant named Goll is referred to hi Wood-Martin, Traces of the Elder Faiths of
Ireland, I, 351-52. In "Laegaire's Visit to Fairy Land" (ed. Cross, Modern Philology,
XIII, 156-62) a redoubtable adversary, Goll mac Duilb, who was probably a giant, was
at war with the fairy folk, and was slain by Laegaire, who thus freed Mag Mell from

220

THE GRAIL AND THE ENGLISH "Sin PERCEVAL" 45

In the entire absence of any other explanation for the facts
observed the natural conclusion is that Sp and M go back, probably
through several removes, to a common original X. The sequence
of events in Sp and M is essentially the same. Both begin with
the enfances formula and both contain an incident of the "Finn and
the Goblin" type.

It may be well to consider how far M belongs to the "Finn and
the Goblin" type — that is, how far the "Goblin" episode figures in
M. This is desirable both because the type has not before been
studied, and because the episode is altered in M in such a way that
it might escape a hasty observer. The alteration consists in the fact
that the "goblin," instead of molesting a feast, or burning a royal
city, has repeatedly slain a man of Ireland.

The parallelism between this part of M and the episode of
"Goblin" (A) in the Acallam may be summed up as follows: In
both M and A, a goblin foe has injured Finn's friends on successive
Hallowe'ens. (In Af, Aed has slain several men of Ireland; in A,
Aille'n has burnt Tara.) In both M and A, Finn gets advice and a
spear from Fiacail. In both M and A, Finn kills the goblin on
Hallowe'en with Fiacail's spear just as the uncanny foe is entering his
fairy-knoll. In both M and A the goblin is lamented by the fairy
folk. It is not told in M who voiced this lament; in A it was uttered
by the mother. Aed's patronymic "mac Fidga" in M seems a
mere distortion of Aillen "mac Midhna" in A. One of the oldest
MSS of A calls him once "Faillen mac Fidhgha."1 Aed, which
means "fire, " is easily explained as another epithet for the fire-goblin
Aillen. Ninth-century tales about Finn mention a supernatural

oppression. The situation is like the war between the Tuatha D6 Danaan and the
Fomorians in Cath Maige Tured.

Gaelic ballads relate battles between Finn and one-eyed monsters. See J. F.
Campbell, Leabhar na Feinne (1872), pp. 59 f., and especially the story of Finn's killing
an enchanter named Roc who had but one hand, one foot, and one eye, at Ess Ruadh,
p. 63. The Lays and Middle-Irish tales call Goll "na Beumanan" (Goll of the blows).
This epithet is regularly applied to Balor, the well-known one-eyed leader of the Fomorians,
"Balar Beimann" (Larminie, West Irish Folk-Tales [1893], p. 1; Curtin, Hero-Tales
[1894], p. 296), which suggests that at least in later tales Goll and Balor are confused.
Finn's goblin foe perhaps grew out of tales about Fomorians like Balor who were adver-
saries of the Tuatha De Danaan. Any one of these might have been named Goll, and
have been the original of Gollerotherame.

1 Rawlinson B. 487, folio 21 a, quoted by Stokes, Acallam, p. 287.

221

46 ARTHUR C. L. BROWN

foe called Aed.1 The parallels pointed out between M and A find
an echo throughout in Sp.

Both M and a part of Sp, therefore, belong to the "Finn and the
Goblin" type. X, the hypothetical source of M and Sp, must also
have contained the "Goblin" episode, doubtless in a form more like
the older folk-tales in which the goblin troubled a feast. We arrive,
therefore, at the conclusion that M and Sp rest upon a common
original X, which was doubtless a folk-tale2 about a combat between
demi-gods and giants, carried on by means of talismanic weapons.
The main part of the thread of X is preserved in M, but it has been
rigorously euhemerized, and owes its preservation to the fact that
it was regarded as history, and was attached to the historical or
pseudo-historical Finn saga.

The evidence of M proves that the central episode in Sp
originally belonged to the "Finn and the Goblin" type of story,
and M gives us a fair idea of what X, the source of Sp, was like.

XIII

It must not be forgotten that M and Sp have both been rational-
ized, although in different ways. M keeps the formula of X better
than Sp. On the other hand Sp retains better the supernatural
machinery. The author of M appears to have had an aversion to
the marvelous, which he has carefully eliminated, doubtless because
he wished his heroic saga to be connected with the annals of Ireland.
He retained, however, Finn's encounter with the fairies at a sid (21 f.),
no doubt because it did not strike Irish hearers as unhistorical.

The author of Sp, which was frankly a romance, had no objection
to the supernatural as such, as witness his use of the Red Knight's
magic armor, of the ring that rendered the wearer invulnerable,
and of the witch mother who could restore her son to life. The

iSee Rev. Celt., XIII, 171.

2 Panzer's "Barensohn" formula (Studien zur Germ. Sagengeschichte, 1910, I)
resembles Sp more than it does Beowulf, for Beowulf contains nothing corresponding to
the hero's rescue of a princess from an other-world land and his subsequent marriage to
her, which is a part of the formula, and which is in Sp. Panzer builds up his formula out,
of more than two hundred folk-tales so widely separated in place and tune from each
other and from the home of the Beowulf poem that his book merely demonstrates a proba-
bility (cf. von Sidow, ZFDA, LIII (1911), 123-31) that Beowulf has a basis in m&rchen.
Panzer's book could be used to establish with at least equal probability a m&rchen back-
ground for Sp.

222

THE GRAIL AND THE ENGLISH "Bra PERCEVAL" 47

rationalization that has affected Sp is rather an unconscious process
occasioned by the inability of the narrator, perhaps of a series of
narrators, to conceive the incidents as other than a part of the
chivalric life of the age and of the people for whom he told his
romance. Examples of this process are seen in his calling the
battle in which the elder Perceval was killed a tournament; in
his making King Arthur dub Perceval knight; and in his picturing
the giant Gollerotherame as a "sowdane" who fights with a sword.
The tendency is that usual in earlier times and no different in prin-
ciple from Garrick's playing Macbeth in powdered wig and velvet
breeches. Its effect, however, is to blur the machinery of the plot.

The Fotha Catha Cnucha, because it is told as straight history,
has been rationalized to an extreme degree. In it scarcely a trace of
the original folk-tale formula is discernible.1

Not only are the changes wrought by rationalization important;
also the structure of these two Irish pseudo-historical documents M
and Fotha Catha demands a moment's consideration. M has,
evidently, been unskilfully patched together out of two independent
accounts, thus introducing two characters called "The Grey One
of Luachair."2 The first is a woman (§ 4). The second is the
warrior "who dealt the first wound to Cumall in the battle of Cnucha"
(§ 16). The warrior did not belong in the first of these accounts.
He is not mentioned in (§2) along with Finn's other enemies in
the battle, only an obscure phrase ("the man who kept Cumall's
treasure-bag," etc.) referring to him has been inserted. In the
same way two characters called Aed, both enemies to Finn, have
arisen. The first Aed (the son of Daire the Red) is said to be the
same as Goll mac Morna; the second Aed (the son of Fidga) is
a fairy antagonist.

After the first few paragraphs Goll disappears from M. This
first part of M doubtless comes from an annalistic source resembling
the Fotha Catha, but differing from it in having no mention of Conn.
The second part of M comes from something pretty close to a folk-
tale. This source (X), which had some literary connection with

1 See Nutt, Folk and Hero Tales, ed. Maclnnes (1890), notes, pp. 399 f., and his
table, p. 417.

2 Nutt noticed this, Folk-Lore Record, IV (1881), 17, note.

223

48 ARTHUR C. L. BROWN

the source of Sp, made Aed the chief enemy to Finn, and had little
to say of Goll— that is, it was like Gilla in Chomded's poem, which
does not mention Goll, although it refers to "the sons of Morna."1

The Fotha Catha is also a piecing together of independent
accounts. One of them was probably the tenth-century metrical
Dindshenchas "Almu I" (ed. Gwynn, RIA, Todd Lecture Series,
IX (1906), 72-77, from LL). This knows nothing of Goll, but
mentions Fiacail and Bodmall. The other source must have told
of Goll.

At the risk of being tedious it is necessary to reiterate that none
of the documents, not even those in Irish, are pure fairy tales.
They have all been more or less rationalized by narrators who gave

them a realistic setting.

XIV

What was the character of X, the common original of Sp and M f
One or two passages which have been discussed above, where traces
of a similar working up of an incident appear both in English and
Irish, do not prove that X had developed far beyond the folk-lore
stage. It was essentially a folk-tale because it preserved for the
most part the original motivation. " Folk-tales do not leave the

i Goll seems to have taken the place of an older opponent of Finn named Aed,
and perhaps the identification of Goll mac Morna and Aed mac Daire, which is made by
M and the Fotha Catha, may be due to a hannonizer of different traditions. The notion
that a supernatural person named Aed was one of Finn's chief antagonists is old. A
ninth- or tenth-century prose tale, "Finn and the Phantoms" (see Rev Celt., XIII, 17 f.,
and for the date Fianaigecht, p. xxiii), relates that Aed Rind, son of Ronan, slew a hundred
of the F iana, and many of their chiefs. Nobody dared to oppose this terrible foe except
Finn. Cailte finally made peace with him. Aed was received into the Fiana, and
afterward lived by turns part of the time in his home, a fairy-knoll, and part of the
tune with Finn. Another Aed, a fairy chief who made presents to Finn, is mentioned in
the Acallam na Sendrach, 3640 f. (Silva Gadelica, II, 111). Among the graves of famous
heroes is mentioned that of Aed mac Fidaig in a tenth-century poem in LL (Fianaigecht,
p. xxiii). These Aeds are different personages but there can be little doubt that they
were a good deal confused in the various tales, and they may hark back to a mythologica
Aed who was a giant and a demi-god.

In support of the hypothesis that Goll displaced an older Aed it may be remarked
that, according to the ancient tale just outlined, Aed Rind was at first a [fairy] adversary
who was later received into Finn's band. This is not unlike the story of Goll, who at
first a foe became a companion to Finn. In LL, 204a, 32 (cf . RIA facsimile, introd., p. 54) ,
is a poem ascribed to Finn about the exploits of Goll mac Morna: " ' Give me my harp*
cries the hero [Goll] ' that I may play it — grand the strain — that I may put the host to
sleep.' So we were all put to sleep by the yellow-haired son of Morna. When sleep
had overpowered us the foe [Goll] leapt on us and we were only awakened by the death
shouts of the Fiana" Goll is here a foe who, after enchanting Finn's men with music,
slays them, much as Aed, and Aillen did in the stories above related. My conjecture
is that Goll mac Morna has developed out of an older Fomorian or one-eyed monster.
The explanation that Goll was a sobriquet given to Aed after he had lost an eye by the
spear of Luchet reads like a bit of rationalization. Cf. Schofleld, Mythical Bards (1920).
pp. 317, 352.

THE GRAIL AND THE ENGLISH "Sin PERCEVAL" 49

point of the story in the dark. Their hearers object to puzzles."1
As far as the enfances framework is concerned, X closely resembled
M, the main difference being that M omits supernatural features,
most of which have left traces in Sp. It is for this reason that Sp
cannot come from M, and since M is too old to come from Sp, both
must go back to a common source, X. As for the "Finn and the
Goblin" episode, X must have been like the older Irish tales in
representing the "goblin" as troubling a feast (as in Sp) rather than
as slaying a man as in M, or burning a city as in A. Some reasons
for these conclusions are as follows.

M explains why the hero's name was kept secret, a point that
needs clearing up in Sp and in all the related stories, but is never
elsewhere adequately motivated.2 In M the foster-mother's chief
desire was to keep Finn's name and whereabouts from the knowledge
of the sons of Morna and especially from Goll, his father's foe,
because they were watching to kill him. The point is made abun-
dantly clear.3 A comparison with M enables us to comprehend why,
in Sp, Perceval is ignorant of his name. His mother had kept it
secret for fear of the Red Knight, that uncanny foe who had slain
the father, and was, doubtless, on the watch to kill the son. We
also understand the namelessness of Perceval in Chretien's romance
and in all related stories. Chretien appears to be puzzled by the
idea,4 for he does not set it forth at all clearly. This explanation for

1 Quoted from Professor Kittredge, A Study of Gawain and the Green Knight, p. 249.

2 Lanzelet, which in the enfances portion has suffered less from rationalization than
any other cognate tale outside of Celtic story, comes as usual closest to the real point
here. The merminne told Lanzelet that he should not know his name until the day that
he should slay the terrible Iweret.

3 The women warriors "carry away the boy, for his mother durst not let him be with
her." "The boy was secretly reared. That was indeed necessary for .... the sons
of Morna were lying in wait" (§4). That was why his mother visited him secretly.
' ' She was afraid of the sons of Morna for him " ( § 5) . He fled ' ' from the sons of Morna ' '
(§7). The women warriors told him to leave them because "the sons of Morna are
watching to kill thee" (§ 12). That was why he did not reveal his name to the King of
Bantry (§13); or to the King of Kerry (§14). That was why he went to learn poetry
"for fear of the son of Urgriu and of the sons of Morna" (§ 17).

«Ed. Baist, Li Contes del Graal, vv. 340 f., 3535 f. Bl (Bliocadrans' Prologue), ed.
Polvin, 739-42, says that when the boy was baptized, his name was so called that it was
never known, or announced, or perceived:
" Ses noms fu issi apie!6s

Com s'il, onques ne fust veus (Ms. Add. 36, 614, reads "seus" Miss Weston,

Ne nonci&s, ne apierceus." 740. Sir Perc., I, 71, note).

In fact the lad's name is never given in this Prologue. This is one of the marks of a hero
brought up by a fee. He is nameless till he accomplishes his adventure. Cf. Parzival

225

50 ARTHUR C. L. BROWN

the namelessness of the hero was in X, since in all the romances
that may be supposed to derive from X this namelessness appears
without apparent reason. In the romances the original motivation
has dropped out because their authors did not understand (what
would be clear to any Celt) that the plot involved a struggle between
two clans.

The Red Knight's yearly theft of King Arthur's golden cup,
which is never adequately motivated or explained in Sp, or Chretien,
or any of the related romances, can be understood by a comparison
of the "Goblin" episode in M and other Irish stories. To Irish
hearers, familiar with fairy lore, the conduct of the "goblin" was no
puzzle. The king was under a spell or enchantment cast by the
"goblin," the sign of which was that every night or every year
the fairy molested his feast, just as according to modern Irish peasant
belief cows when under enchantment are supposed to be visited
by the fairies nightly, or at stated intervals. This explanation,
which is clear enough in M , must have been in the source X. X was,
then, practically a folk-tale and the main thread of its plot is well
preserved in M .

Was X Irish? The purpose of this investigation is to try to
restore the folk-tale source of Sp, and thus to unravel the original
motivation, which will appear plainer (if our hypothesis of popular
origin be correct) the closer we get to the folk-tale. For our immedi-
ate purpose it matters little among what people the story arose, so
long as we can grasp the point of it. The discussion, however, has
made clear that X resembles a set of Irish tales (especially M) which
are older than the rise of French Arthurian romance. In the com-
plete absence of any other tales of like antiquity that closely resemble
Sp the conclusion is almost inevitable that X was Irish. M contains
the enfances feeriques formula and this formula, therefore, appears
to have been worked out by the Irish long before it can be pointed
out anywhere else in the west of Europe.

(ed. Martin, 113, 4), Li Biaus Descone&s, Libeaus Desconus, Enfances Gauvain (Romania,
XXXIX [1910], 1 f.), and De Ortu Waluuanii (ed. Bruce, Hesperia [1913], pp. 59, 92). In
De Ortu the hero is called "puer sine nomine."

226

THE GRAIL AND THE ENGLISH "Sin PERCEVAL" 51

Any lingering skepticism about the antiquity of the enfances
feeriques formula in Irish1 must be dispelled by the existence of an
older example, which is contained in two texts: the Macgnimrada
Conculaind and the Tochmarc Entire, concerning the great antiquity
of which there is no doubt in anybody's mind.

The Macgnimrada Conculaind, or "The Youthful Deeds of Cuchu-
linn," is a part of the Tain Bo Cualnge, and belongs substantially
in its present form to the eighth century.2 We here read that
Cuchulinn was brought up at a distance from the king's court,
although not by fees, and went thither as a boy. Like Perceval,
Cuchulinn was a nephew to the king (Conchobor), but the latter
had no knowledge of him, and inquired the boy's name. Like
Finn and Perceval, Cuchulinn was swift enough of foot to run down
deer, and he shot water birds (swans). Like Finn he killed some
of the boy troop with whom he played. Like Finn he did not get the
name by which he is generally known till he had accomplished a
great exploit. He slew the dog of Culann the Smith, and because he
offered to take the dog's place as watcher he became known as the
Dog of Culann, "Cu-chulinn."

Cuchulinn, according to the Macgnimrada, was trained at first in
the house of his father Sualtam,3 but, like Finn and Perceval, he
went later to be taught by fairy women. This part of his youthful
adventures is not told in the Macgnimrada, but forms a part of
another text, the Tochmarc Emire.* When Cuchulinn was six
years old (according to LU), and had done a number of exploits, he
set out to secure training in arms. He accomplished a dreadful

1 Enfances feeriques are ascribed to Dermot ("He studied with Manannan mac Lir,
and was brought up by him in the 'Land of Promise.' He was taught by Angus mac
Oc, son of the Dagda," Silva Gadelica, I, 266; II, 300), but the story of Dermot's youth
does not, so far as I know, exist.

2 J. Dunn, Tdin B6 Cualnge (1914), p. xvii; Faraday, The Cattle-Raid of Cualnge
(1904), p. xvi. The Irish text summarized above is in Windisch, Irische Texte, extraband
(1905), pp. 106-171.

« This story of Cuchulinn's education at the house of his father Sualtam is probably
not primitive, although far older than the twelfth century. Of. Kuno Meyer, Miscellanea
hibernica (University of Illinois Studies, 1916), pp. 9 flf.; T. P. Cross, Modern Philology,
XVI (1918), 219 f. According to the oldest stories, Cuchulinn was not the son of
Sualtam but of the demi-god Lug; see Nutt, Voyage of Bran, II, 43 f.

4 A shorter version of the Tochmarc Emire (in MS Rawlinson B512), which contains
all the points here summarized, is thought by Meyer to date from the eighth century,
Rev. Celt., XI, 439. A longer version (from LU and later MSS) has been translated by
Meyer, Archaeological Review, I. No use is here made of any point peculiar to this
later version except the statement that Cuchulinn was but six years old, which occurs in
LU; see Faraday, op. cit.t p. 16.

227

52 ARTHUR C. L. BROWN

journey across the Plain of 111 Luck to reach the land of Scathach
(The Shadowy), compelled her to give him instruction in arms, to
become his mistress, and to foretell to him the future. In winning
Scathach he was helped by her daughter Uathach (The Terrible),
who fell in love with him. Before winning Scathach he slew a
champion named Chocur Crufe, whose place he took. He later
fought in battle on behalf of Scathach against another supernatural
queen named Aife, and won a victory.

This story from the Tochmarc Emire is plainly a folk-tale that
has been arranged to fit into the artificial heroic saga of Cuchulinn.
It, taken together with the Macgnlmrada, demonstrates the exist-
ence in Ireland, more than three hundred years before the rise of
French and English romance, of a folk-tale about a hero who had a
youth parallel in several points to that of Finn and Perceval, and
who like them was trained in feats of arms by two women of the
Other World.1

Since the antiquity in Irish of the enfances feeriques formula is
beyond dispute; since M, the closest parallel to Sp that we have
been able to point out, is Irish, and is evidently too old to be influ-
enced by Arthurian romance, it seems impossible to avoid concluding
that X, the common original of Sp and M, was Irish.

ARTHUR C. L. BROWN

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

(To be continued)

1 Whether the folk-tale from which sprang this episode in Tochmarc Emire belonged
to the fairy mistress type or not is of no consequence to the argument. We are con-
cerned only with the fact that Cuchulinn as a youth visited the Other World and was
there trained by supernatural women, which is sufficiently obvious in Tochmarc Emire
as it stands. Professor Ogle's failure to see in Scathach a fairy mistress (Amer. Jour, of
Philology, XXXVII [1916], 403 f.), therefore, does not matter here. His objection,
however, makes it worth while to say very explicitly that neither Tochmarc Emire in this
episode, nor M , nor Sp, nor (e.g.) Chretien's Ivain, is a fairy mistress story as it stands.
Nobody ever thought so. My point was, and is, that nobody can understand or explain
any one of them except by restoring a more original folk-tale form in which it was a fairy
mistress story. Why keep repeating " Laudine ist keine fee" ? (Poerster, Yvain [1906],
pp. xlvii et al.) In the entire absence of any evidence to the contrary I see in Scathach
and her "daughter" Uathach (Do not let us take the relationship of fairies seriously!)
the usual pair of supernatural women, like Lunet and Laudine (Ivain), the merminne and
Iblis (Lanzelet), Blancemal and Blances Mains (Li Biaus Desconeus), the sisters in La
Mule sanz Frain, the sisters Li Ban and Fand in Serglige Conculaind (and, as the argument
tends to prove, Acheflour and Luf amour in Sp), who control the hero's destiny. That
both Scathach and Uathach (and Aife as well) were mistresses to Cuchulinn shocks
literal-minded people who do not comprehend that these creatures were fees. Be it
remembered that Lanzelet was accused of having the merminne as a mistress (Diu Crdne,
24517 f.). Uathach plays the part of Lunet because she meets the hero first, helps him
and tells him how to win Scathach. Both in this episode from Tochmarc Emire and in M
an original fairy story has been obfuscated in adapting it to the supposedly historical
figures of Cuchulinn and Finn. The element of fairy control has been pretty thoroughly
obscured, doubtless because it did not accord with the spirit of heroic saga, which tended
to exalt the hero's hardihood.

228

REVIEWS AND NOTICES

Mythical Bards and the Life of William Wallace. By WILLIAM
HENRY SCHOFIELD. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1920. (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, Vol. V.)
Pp. xii+381.

Mythical Bards and the Life of William Wallace, by the late Professor
William Henry Schofield, of Harvard University, is the outcome of studies
designed to lay the foundation for a History of English Literature from Chaucer
to Elizabeth, which the author planned as a continuation of his English
Literature from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer.

Professor Schofield's book deals primarily with the problem of Blind
Harry and the well-known fifteenth-century Life of William Wallace, so long
attributed to him. After reviewing previous critical opinion, the author
states his general conclusions as follows:

I assume that the author of the Wallace was called Blind Harry; but I believe
that he was not a minstrel at all in the ordinary acceptation of the term, and that
he was never blind. I venture to hold that Blind Harry was only the author's
pseudonym, and I shall try to establish the existence in myth and show the
nature of the strange personage who has always been treated as the author of
the work [pp. 12 f .].

While accepting John Major's evidence that at the end of the first quarter
of the sixteenth century the Wallace was attributed to a poet called Blind
Harry, Professor Schofield believes that the name Blind Harry — like Blind
Homer, Blind Tiresias, and Blind Ossian — is the work of traditional mytho-
poeic imagination. In an interlude written by Dunbar about 1500 a dwarf
calls himself "Blynd Hary, That lang has bene in the Fary, Farleis to fynd, "
and asserts that he is descended from the Ossianic heroes Fyn Mac Kowle
and Gow Mackmorne — facts which, taken in connection with a large body
of evidence from popular tradition, indicate to Professor Schofield that by
the beginning of the sixteenth century the Wallace-poet was regarded as a
seer who, like Ossian, Thomas Rhymer, and other mythical personages, had
derived supernatural knowledge from a sojourn in the other world and who
had been punished with blindness for some breach of supernatural law.

"To all intents and purposes the Wallace is an anonymous book" (p. 116).
A study of the content of the poem shows that the author, far from being
an itinerant bard a nativitate luminibus captus .-. . . qui historiarum recita-
tione coram principibus victum et vestitum quo dignus erat nactus est (cf.
Mythical Bards, p. 291, note), was a clever, self-conscious artist who was fond
229] 53

54 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

of imitating Chaucer and who aimed at literary display (p. 126). In order
to induce his readers the more willingly to accept the fictions in which he
clothes the figure of William Wallace, he uses devices which suggest those
adopted by the author of Sir John Mandeville's Travels and "that arch-
impostor of the Middle Ages, Geoffrey of Monmouth .... who with similar
humility asserted his reliance solely on a mysterious book which he alone
was privileged to possess, and with similar anxiety protested the sooth-
fastness of his account, though it might not tally wholly with the information
obtainable from other sources" (p. 118). Writing about 1483, when Scottish
indignation against England ran high, the Wallace-poet was intent upon
fomenting strife, and to this end he chose as his theme the exploits of a
national hero who had valiantly opposed the Southron and, as a mouthpiece,
a bard who, like Ossian and Billie Blin, alias Odin, had loved enmity and
discord (p. 160). He was neither a quiet scholar nor an amicable, chivalric
ecclesiastic, like Barbour, with whom he has been compared, but "a vigorous
propagandist, a ferocious realpolitiker, without principle when it was a
question of Scotland's place in the sun, without reluctance to lie in manipu-
lating history to his own end" (p. 146). The worthy French clerk, "Master
Blair," whose "Latin book" the poet explicitly mentions as his principal
authority, is comparable to Chaucer's Lollius, and may be an echo of Master
Blaise, the fictitious recorder of the deeds of Merlin (p. 176). Professor
Schofield's book deserves well of the republic of letters for having dispelled
once for all the fog of guesswork and pseudo-scholarship by which the real
Wallace has so long been hidden.

But Mythical Bards is far more than a careful study of an oft-misinter-
preted Middle Scots poem. The author brings a large number of Celtic and
Scandinavian documents to bear on the solution of problems in early Scottish
literature, and his conclusions point the way to much-needed investigations
in this field (cf. p. 163). The vexed Homeric problem appears less compli-
cated when viewed in connection with the fabled writer of the Wallace and
with other "blind " poets. By collecting a large amount of material dealing
with primitive conceptions regarding the source of poetic inspiration, the
author throws a flood of light on early attempts to solve the riddle of genius
and on ancient critical theories of its origin and scope.1 In general,
Mythical Bards is marked by the broad scholarship and the keen vision of
literary problems which have always been the chief characteristics of the
author's work.

By Professor Schofield's death scholarship has suffered an irreparable
loss. Few teachers have ever presented the literary treasures of the Middle

1 How much early assertions regarding Homer and the bards, scalds, and minstrels
of the Middle Ages influenced conceptions of "original genius" and "nature poetry"
during the Romantic period, the writer of this review hopes to show at an early date.
Professor Schofleld's study forms an indispensable background for the study of this and
other important problems in Romanticism.

230

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 55

Ages in a fashion more likely to catch the ear of the modern world.
Yet, in spite of the growing tendency in education to discredit the value of
research, Professor Schofield never lost sight of the high and holy aim of
learning. The inspiration of his work has been felt by men who never sat
under his instruction. By those who have studied under him he will ever be
remembered as a stimulating teacher and a genuinely disinterested and
sympathetic friend.

T. P. CROSS
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Old and New, Sundry Papers. By C. H. GRANDGENT. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1920. Pp. 177.

Old and New, Sundry Papers, is the title of a volume containing eight
essays and addresses by Professor C. H. Grandgent, of Harvard University.
Though covering a rather wide range of subjects, the papers included "have
this in common, that they treat, in general, of changes in fashion, especially
in matters of speech and of school" (Preface).

"Fashion and the Broad A," "The Dog's Letter," and "New England
Pronunciation" are scholarly yet delightful essays on subjects which should
interest every student of language. If there were more philologists like
Professor Grandgent, Mr. H. L. Mencken would have less occasion to com-
plain that American college professors investigate forgotten dialects to the
neglect of living English. In "Numeric Reform in Nescioubia" the author
by the use of a parable seeks to convince a recalcitrant and osteocephalic
generation that the current mode of spelling should be changed for one less
hampered by tradition. In "School" and in the address on the teaching of
modern languages he demonstrates with irresistible logic that the short-
comings of modern education are largely attributable to inadequately
trained teachers, lax standards of instruction, "easy" substitutes for the old
humanistic curriculum, and other features of the new "democratic" move-
ment.

" Nor Yet the New " should be read in connection with " The Dark Ages, "
which was listened to with such keen pleasure by the members of the Modern
Language Association a few years ago. In these two papers Professor
Grandgent points out how much the Modernists have lost by attempting to
cut themselves off from the past. In pictorial and literary art, in education,
and even in morality "the insurgent attitude has now become a pose."
Professor Grandgent believes that the whole Modernist educational propa-
ganda "is based on the false assumption that knowledge can be acquired
without painfully conscious effort, if we but pick out alluring kinds of
knowledge," and that its greatest danger "lies in its coincidence with the
innate laziness of man." With honest seekers after truth in the field of

231

56 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

educational method, Professor Grandgent has no quarrel; he is striving against
those who listen with credulity to the honeyed whispers or cacophonous
blather of monohippic pedagogical theorists and who in their spiritual
blindness follow the leadership of educational demagogues.

Professor Grandgent is no mere theorist. His conclusions are based on
a long and successful career as a scholar, a teacher, and a school administra-
tor. All who love wisdom and sound doctrine should read his words with
attention; and they should ponder them in their hearts, for, in the language
of Professor Grandgent's favorite poet, non fa scienza, senza lo ritenere,
avere inteso. If it be true, as Holy Writ asserts, that the wise "shall shine
as the brightness of the firmament, " those who are willing to profit by Pro-
fessor Grandgent's observations have an assured place in the galaxy of the
future.

T. P. CROSS

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

232

Modern Philology

VOLUME XVIII September IQ2O NUMBER 5

THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE CHAPEL ROYAL

An institution to which some attention has been paid, and which
deserves more, is the Chapel Royal. It deserves attention because
in its most famous years, during the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries, it played a considerable part in the development of English
music and drama. Upon the dramatic side, besides countless ani-
madversions in histories of the theater, it has been treated exten-
sively by Professor C. W. Wallace in his Evolution of the English
Drama1 and Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars,2 and by Mrs. C. C.
Stopes in her William Hunnis and the Revels of the Chapel Royal.3
But even before these scholars began sifting vast piles of Elizabethan
documents for new evidence, the names of William Cornish, Richard
Edwards, William Hunnis, and Nathaniel Gyles were of recognized
importance, and a great deal of curiosity had been displayed regard-
ing the boys who as the "Children of the Chapel'7 played in the
hallowed Blackfriars Theater and aroused the wrath of Shakespeare.
On the musical side much less has been done, and yet there are the
names of Abyngdon, Cornish, Newark, Tallis, Byrd, Farrant, and
Gibbons, among others, to whet curiosity. It is in that respect that
the Chapel deserves more attention.

The present article, however, attempts to treat the Chapel
neither from the dramatic nor from the musical point of view.
Instead I have taken for my point of departure the most important

1 Berlin, 1912.

2 University of Nebraska Studies, 1908.

» Vol. XXIX of Bang's Materialien series, 1910.

65 [ MODERN PHILOLOGY, September, 1920

66 H AHOLD N. HlLLEBRAND

work on the general history of the Chapel which has yet appeared,
namely, Rimbault's edition of the Old Cheque Book of the Chapel
Royal,1 and have attempted to fill in some of the lacunae. Rim-
bault's survey of the history and constitution of the Chapel before
the period covered by the Cheque Book is merely a sketch, to which
I have been able to add many details. And especially he seems not
to have known that in the Bodleian is a manuscript register duplicat-
ing the Cheque Book in the main, but varying from it in many par-
ticulars and richer by important entries after 1600. This document
should be known to all students whose work touches upon the
Chapel Royal. I feel, accordingly, that its publication is the most
important function of the present article, and that the historical
survey is to be regarded as a prefatory note.

1. THE CHAPEL BEFORE EDWARD

Prior to the time of Edward IV notices of the constitution and
regulation of the Chapel Royal are scattering and thin. The earliest
particulars date from the reign of Henry I (1100-1135), and are
meager enough. They are contained in the Liber Rubeus Scacarii,
where they form part of a table of household regulations headed
Haec est constitutio Domus Regis de procurationibus.2 There were
two gentlemen, four servants, and two sumpter-horses, whoever and
whatever else there may have been.

The ordinances of Edward III concerning his Chapel are vague;
all we can discover is that there were a dean and five clerks.3 The

1 Printed by the Camden Society, new series, No. 3.

2 The Liber Rubeus has been edited by Hubert Hall and published as No. 99 of the
"Rolls Series." The section dealing with the Chapel is found on p. 807 of Vol. III.
The same constitutions of the royal household form a part of the Liber Niger Scacarii,
which has been reprinted by Thomas Hearne, Oxford, 1728. Cf. Hall's Introduction,
Vol. Ill, p. cclxxxviii, where he points out that whereas the document in the Black Book
had been previously dated Henry II, its proper date is Henry I, ca. 1135, as the Red Book
shows.

The section of the Liber Rubeus relating to the Chapel runs as follows:
Capellanus Gustos Capellae et Reliquiarum Conridium duorum hominum; et iiij
servientes Capellae, unusquisque duplicem cibum ; et duo sumarii Capellae, unusquisque
denarium in die; et id. ad ferrandum in mense. Ad servitium Capellae, duos cereos die
Mercurii et ij die Sabbati; et unaquaque nocte j cereum coram reliquiis; et xxx frustra
candelarum; et j galonem de vino claro ad missam: et unum sextarium de vino
expensabili die Absolutionis, ad lavandum altare. In die Paschae ad communionem j
sextarium de vino claro et j de expensabili.

Clericus expensae panis et vini, ijs in die, et siminellum sal[atum], et j sextarium
vim expensabilis, et j cereolum, et xxiiij frustra candelarum.

8 A Collection of Ordinance and Regulation for the Government of the Royal Household,
Ac. Printed for the Society of Antiquaries, John Nichols, London, 1790, p. *10.

234

EARLY HISTORY OF CHAPEL ROYAL 67

ordinances of 33 Henry VI give us clearly the membership of the
Chapel at that time: " 1 Deane, 20 Chapeleins and Clerks, 7 Childryn,
1 Chaplain Confessor for the Householde, 1 Yoman. "J Within the
year, however, the number of the children was increased to ten, for
in 1456 (34 Henry VI) forty marks were granted to Henry Abyngdon
for the instruction and governance of ten boys of the Chapel of the
Household.2

To these familiar but meager facts concerning the Chapel before
Edward IV, I am able to add a few items which have hitherto escaped
notice. In the Calendar of Patent Rolls, under date of April 18, 1414,
is an acquittance to Richard Prentys, late dean of the Chapel, of
responsibility for the equipment thereof, excepting certain articles
which are granted as gifts to various chapels and persons; and this
list of exceptions, covering nearly two pages of fine type, bears
witness to an opulent establishment. From the first year of Henry
VI (1423) comes the first mention of the Children of the Chapel which
involves anything more than a bare enumeration. It forms part of
the proceedings of the Privy Council for June 15, 1423:

Thys ben ye nessessary thynges yt be rythe nedful for ye schyldern of
ye schapel, of ye wych ye namys be,

Thomas Myldevale

John Brampton

John Maydeston

John Grymmesby

Nicolas Hyll

Stephanus Howell

In primis every schyld j. gowne & j. hode & j. doubelat & ij. payre of
linnen clothys and ij payr of hosyn and iij payr of schon.

In bedyng ij . schylder j . contour & testour & i. payr blankets & ij . payr
schetys & j. paylet & j. canvas. |

L^fera inde fuit facta apud Westmonasterium xxiij.0
die Junij anno &c primo.3

Not without interest, also, is a petition of the clerks of the Chapel,
made to the Privy Council on August 6, 1455 (33 Henry VI), to
consider "the grete labour that thei have daily in your chapell

1 Ibid., p. *17.

2 Cal. of Pat. Rolls, 1452-61, p. 279.

a Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England (edited by Sir Harris
Nicolas, London, 1834), III. 104.

235

68 HAROLD N. HILLEBRAND

bicause the numbre of hir feliship is lasse that it was woned to be,
and for to ordeyne such a numbre as they may endure and doo better
service to God and to your highnesse, and that this numbre may be
at the least xxiiij. synging men. "l

By this time a method of recruiting for the Chapel had been put
in use which was to continue in favor for two centuries — namely,
that of impressing from the choirs of other churches. I am not
aware how old this seemingly high-handed practice was. It was an
expedient frequently used, as every student knows, not only for
filling the ranks of the Chapel Royal, but also for obtaining men
of almost any kind — artificers,2 mechanics, musicians, etc. — to do
work for the crown. The earliest writ of this kind for the Chapel
that I have been able to find was granted in 1420, when John Pyamour,
clerk, was authorized to take up as many boys as were needed for
the Chapel wherever he could find them and to bring them to the
king, who was then in the duchy of Normandy.3 The oft-printed
grant to John Melyonek of September 16, 1484,4 which authorized
him to take up "al suche singing men & childre being expart in the
said science of Musique as he can finde and think sufficient and able
to do vs seruice, " is noteworthy in that it directs the impressment of
men as well as boys. The writs of later date were confined to
children. How they came to be abused forms one of the most
interesting chapters in the dramatic history of the Chapel.

In order that the depredations of the master of the Chapel might
not injure certain other favored choirs, such as those of St. Paul's
and the royal chapels at Westminster and Windsor, exemptions were
frequently granted these institutions. The earliest of these that has
come to my hand is dated July 9, 1453, when, at the request of
Thomas Lyseux, dean of St. Paul's, protection was granted for all
choristers and ministers of the said church, with the assurance that
neither the dean of the king's Chapel nor any other officer or

1 Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England (edited by Sir Harris
Nicholas, London, 1834), VI, 256.

2 Of. the patent to John de Sponlee in 1350 to impress masons and artificers for
work on the new Chapel of St. George, Windsor, and to arrest and imprison such as
disobeyed. Cal. of Pat. Rolls, 1348-50, p. 488.

3 Patent Rolls, 7 Henry V, memb. lid, January 14.

«See Rimbault, Old Cheque Book, p. vii; Collier, History of the English Drama
(1879), I, 41, among others.

EARLY HISTORY OF CHAPEL ROYAL 69

minister of the king should take any such chorister or minister for
the use and service of the king or other against his will.1

2. THE CHAPEL UNDER EDWARD IV

The first full and satisfactory description of the Chapel Royal
dates from the reign of Edward IV, and is contained in the Liber
Niger Domus Regis.2 There were twenty-six chaplains and clerks,
appointed by the king or the dean, "men of worship endowed with
vertuous morall and speculatife as of their musique showing in
discant, cleare voysid weele releesid and pronounceing, eloquent in
redyng, suffisaunt in Organes playing, and modestiall in all othir
manner of behaveing. " They lodged together at or near the court,
and had, each of them, "for winter and summer cloathing of the
grete warderobe of housold fortie shillings." The yeomen of the
Chapel, called also "pistelers, " were two in number. They were
usually appointed from Children of the Chapel when their voices
changed. They received each a daily stipend of 3d. and clothing
from the Wardrobe such as the rest of the Household wore — "playn
and noe partie"; or as an alternative they were allowed by special
dispensation to draw a yearly wage of 53s. 4d. The children were
eight in number, and were supplied in all things pertaining to their
apparel from the Jewelhouse. They were under the supervision of
the master of song, chosen by the dean from among the gentlemen
of the Chapel; "and he to drawe theise childryn aswell in the schoole
of facett, as in songe organes or such othir vertuys." They sat at
the Chapel board next the yeomen of the Vestry, and had for livery
two loaves, a mess of "grete mete," and two gallons of ale. They
had one servant among them "to trusse and bere thair harnys and
to sett thair Livereys in Court. " And when they went about with
the court on one of its removings, they each had 4d. for horse hire.
When their voices changed, if they could not be retained in the
Chapel or given a place at court, they were sent to either of the
universities, and there lodged in a college of the king's foundation
until further advancement was devised for them.

1 Cal. of Pat. Rolls, 1452-61, p. 90.

2 This document, frequently cited, has been printed with many inaccuracies in the
Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the Royal Household, before
referred to.

237

70 HAROLD N. HILLEBBAND

These provisions for the children and other members of the
Chapel Royal are both generous and ample. Doubtless many of the
rules were taken over from the ordinances of Edward III, to which
reference is made. The most kindly of the provisions for choristers
is that which assured them a competent living when they had out-
grown their usefulness in the Chapel. It continued in force down to
the reign of thrifty Elizabeth, when, along with many other per-
quisites of the Chapel, it lapsed,1 and it was revived by James I.2
Most of the children, however, seem not to have availed themselves
of the chance to go through the university; many of them stayed on
in the Chapel, which itself offered a career of distinction, or went into
the chapels of other churches, or went into the court. Some lived
to an old age in the Chapel.

But to return to the regulations of Edward IV. The office of
dean was one "given without presentation or confirmation of any
Bishop." Under his appointment was the master of grammar.
This man was to be versed in poetry and the rules of grammar;
his duties were to teach the king's henchmen, the Children of the
Chapel "after they can their descant," the clerks of the Almonry,
and such other men and children about the court as might be disposed
to learn. For these services he was paid 4Jd. a day, or 9 marks a
year. At this time, apparently, the instruction of the Children of
the Chapel was divided between a master of music and a master of
grammar.

3. THE CHAPEL UNDER HENRY VIII

The next set of Chapel regulations we come upon dates from the
seventeenth year of Henry VIII, and is contained in the same volume
with the Liber Niger.3 It conveys little information for our purpose
because the numbers of the various members of the Chapel are not
given, but instead such information as was more interesting to the
officers of the household, namely, what livery they took and at what

1 Cf. the petition of William Hunnis in 1583, below.

2 As part of an impressment writ to Nathaniel Gyles in 1604.

1 Harl. MS 642. These institutions are arranged under two different headings:
the first, on fol. 129 ff., is "Statuta Regis Henrici octavi facta anno Regni sui 17o"; the
second, fol. 142, " Thappointment of Lodging made by the kings grace at his Mannor
of Eltham the 17th daye of January e in the 17th yeare of his most noble Raigne. " From
the second heading the regulations are generally known as the "Statutes of Eltham."

238

EARLY HISTORY OF CHAPEL ROYAL 71

board they sat. One section of these statutes, which provides that
a portion of the Chapel shall accompany the court on its peregrina-
tions, is worth especial note, for it means that the master of the
children accompanied the court not only on its progresses about
England but also into France. We can trace him there at least
twice: once at the time of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, in 1520,
and probably again in 1544-45, when Henry was waging his last war
against the French.1 When we recollect that during the reign of
Henry, and indeed until late in the century, the Chapel master was
the mainspring of court revelry, deviser and composer of masques
and plays, and actor in them; and when we consider how the native
interludes born at court reflected the similar work of France, as in the
plays of Heywood, then we may begin to speculate as to whether
the French drama came to England or (as seems equally likely) the
Englishmen learned it in France on just such occasions as that of the
Field of the Cloth of Gold, and whether the Chapel, through its
master, was not an influential factor in bringing the farce back to
England.

Aside from the Statutes of Eltham, references to Henry VIIFs
Chapel are without number in the Household Books, Accounts of
the Treasurer of the Chamber, and other records of the sort. We can
judge from them that the constitution of the Chapel was pretty
stable by the accession of Henry, although there were variations in
the number of men and boys. The gentlemen ranged in number
from twenty to thirty-two and the children from eight to twelve.
A puzzling feature of the various sets of figures we encounter is that
the Chapel seems not to have increased steadily in size from the
beginning to the end of the reign but grew and diminished without
apparent reason. For example, in the first year of Henry's reign

1 Among the list of Chapel men who are ordered to accompany Henry into Prance
on the occasion of the Field of the Cloth of Gold (see below, p. 244) occurs the name of
Cornish. That the children also went along is implied by an entry in one of the Books
of King's Payments (Excheq, Miscel., T.R., Vol. CCXVI, p. 201): 12 H. VIII, Aug. lf
"Item to master Cornisshe opon a warrant for the diettes of x Children euery of theim
at ijd. the day for Ixij dais at the kinges Journey to Calais, from the xxtiix day of May
unto the xxijti day of July last — Ciijs. iiijd."

The evidence of the presence of the master in France during the wars of 1544-45
is not so clear. Nevertheless the fact that the Chapel boys were there, as shown by the
wardrobe accounts of Sir Ralph Sadler (see below, p. 241), is a strong implication. It is
unlikely that they would be taken without their master.

239

72 HAROLD N. HILLEBRAND

(1509) there were thirty men and ten children;1 whereas in 1553 the
numbers seem to have been, respectively, twenty and eight.2

About March, 1518, Henry VIII told Cornish, then master of
the Chapel, that Wolsey's chapel was better than his. Cornish
seems to have taken measures at once, for Pace, Wolsey's confidant,
wrote his master on April 1 that "Cornysche doth greatly laud and
praise the child of your chapel sent hither, not only for his sure and
cleanly singing, but also for his good and crafty descant, and doth
in like manner extol Mr. Pygote for the teaching of him."3 The
superiority of the great churchman's chapel is attested in a letter
from Pace of the preceding March :

My lord, if it were not for the personal love that the King's highness
doth bear unto your grace, surely he would have out of your chapel, not
children only, but also men; for his grace hath plainly shown unto Cornysche
that your grace's chapel is better than his, and proved the same by this
reason, that if any manner of new song should be brought unto both the
said chapels to be sung ex improviso, then the said song should be better and
more surely handled by your chapel than by his grace's.4

The splendors of Wolsey's chapel were the admiration of the times;
the cardinal lavished particular care on it, and enriched it with the
plunder of Northumberland's famous and no less splendid chapel.5
A more detailed account of the Chapel is given in The Booke of the
new order of the Houshold of Henry VIII,6 which is to be assigned to
the seventeenth year, as nearly as I can tell from the dating of the

1 From items in a volume of Wardrobe Accounts in the Lord Chamberlain's Office
(L. C. 2/1, Public Record Office). On fol. 153, among warrants issued in the first year
of Henry VIII, are mentioned cloth and accessories for thirty surplices for the men, and
the same for ten surplices for the boys.

2 See Mrs. Stopes's William Hunnis, p. 15, where it is a question of forty surplices
for the men and sixteen for the children. Here, as frequently in these records, the
garments are numbered on the basis of two apiece.

a Brewer and Gairdner, Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, II, Part II, § 4055.

* Ibid., § 4024.

6 Cf. Bishop Percy's edition of The Regulations and Establishment of the Royal House-
hold of Henry Algernon Percy, The Fifth Earl of Northumberland, London, 1770, p. 428.
Wolsey's confiscations came after the death of this earl, on the accession of his son.

The accounts in this little volume are of great interest as showing how nearly royal
were the households of the great nobles. The Northumberland chapel was smaller, to
be sure, than that of Henry VIII, but it made up for lack of numbers in lavishness of
furnishings, which may be read of in Bishop Percy's book. There were ten men and six
children. One extract illustrates the scale of wages that singing men might expect to
receive in those days. It is found on p. 47.

Gentillmen of the Chapell x As to say Two at x marc a pece — Three at iiijii apece —
Two at v marc a pece— Gone at xls. Viz. ij Bassys ij Tenors and vj Countertenors
Childeryn of the Chapel vj after xxvs the pece.

« L. C. 5/12 (Public Record Office).

240

EARLY HISTORY OF CHAPEL ROYAL 73

manuscript — the year of the Statutes of Eltham. On page 50, among
the wages of the ordinary of the king's side, occurs the following list:
The Deane to Eate with Master Treasurer or Master Com-
ptroller.

Gentfewew of ye Chapell

Master of the Children for his wages . . xxx11
Chapell And xxx Boordwages

& Gospeller for wages xiij11 vj8 viijd

Vestry Epistoler xiij11 vj8 viijd

Verger xx11

Yeomen of the Vestry x11

x11

Children of ye Chapel x lxvju xiij8 iiijd

The children received no regular wage, but were given a liberal
largess on high feast days, and received other fees from various
sources and on various occasions. They were remembered on the
birthdays of the king and of the royal family. In the matter of
payments for plays, the master, no doubt, got the lion's share;
but very likely a few pence were given the children for their extra
labor. The largess on high feast days included payments of twenty
shillings at Allhallowtide for singing Audivi vocem, and forty shillings
at Christmas for singing Gloria in excelsis. These payments, with
various others, brought the sum of largesses to £9-13-4.

The children were dressed from the Wardrobe, and that in no
mean fashion. Among the accounts of Sir Ralph Sadler as Custodian
of the Wardrobe, a° 35-36 Henry VIII (1544-15), are given the
expenses of Henry's voyage to France in that year, when he was
waging his last war on the French i1

For x singinge Off Stoore of the greate Warderobe sine

Chyldren xiiij yardes of skarlett kersey for hoose precio

for the said children

George Bristowe for xiij yardes of yel- xxx8

low kersey for hoose for them also price iiijd
the yarde ij8 iiijd

of stoore ij yardes of satten crimsin for sine

the coveringe of hattes for the children precio
sine pretio

Item of the same stoore ij yardes of yel- sine

lowe satten for the same cause sine pretio precio

i Exchequer Accounts, 443/10 (P.R.O.).

241

74 HAROlfo N. HlLLEBRAND

At another time this equipment was required for the use of the
Chapel boys:

For gownes of Tawney Chamblett lined with black satin of Bruges,
and Milan bonettes for the said children. . . . xliij11 iij8 iiijd. For two
children of the King's Chapell, for 2 gownes of Black Chamblett, lined with
black satin of Bruges, 2 cotes of yellow satten of Bruges lined with Coton,
and 2 Milan bonnettes, and for the making and lining of said gownes and
cotes as in the said boke at large it duly apperes x11 xviij8.1

The children seem to have been boarded by their master; but
the evidence in this regard is a little confusing, for the household
ordinances, such as those contained in the Liber Niger and the
Statutes of Eltham, assign to the boys a place at the court table.
Yet we find such payments as this (9 Henry VIII, July 5): "Item
to master Cornisshe opon a warrant for the bordding of x Children
of the Chapell euery of theim at viijd the weke for iij wekes ended
the xxvijth day of Juyne — xx8. "2 This looks as though the boarding
was done by the master, who was reimbursed in part or in whole by
the crown. It was the custom at this time for the choir-boys to
lodge with their master, the cost being defrayed by a grant of money
from the treasury. The patent to Newark,3 for example, reads that
he was to be paid forty marks yearly for the teaching of ten boys
and for supplying them with beds and clothing.

The gentlemen of the Chapel received as their usual wage 1\A.
a day apiece. In addition they had various fees and largesses. One
regular fee of £13-6-8 fell at Christmas. Others came at other
times for other reasons. On January 6, 2 Henry VIII, they were
paid £6-13-4 "for praying for the quenes grace for hir goode delyuer-
aunce. "4 Once a year the gentlemen held a feast, to which it was
customary for the king to contribute. In earlier times he gave a
buck, which was commuted at a later period to money for food and
wine, and finally set at £3.

There is no complete record of the personnel of the Chapel before
1560, the year in which the Cheque Book begins; but among the
various household accounts are a number of lists scattered over the

1 Cited by Mrs. Stopes, William Hunnis, p. 15.

2 Excheq. Miscel., Treasury of Receipt, Vol. CCXV, p. 527.

s In Patent Rolls, 9 Henry VII, memb. 31 (7); dated September 17, 1493.
< Excheq. Miscel., T.R., Vol. CCXV, p. 100.

242

EARLY HISTORY OF CHAPEL ROYAL 75

reigns of the two Henrys, Edward, and Mary, which serve, although
incompletely, to fill in that period.1 Some of them have been
published. The earliest that I have found relates to equipment
for the funeral of Elizabeth, wife of Henry VII, and therefore is
dated February 23, 1504.2 The following names of gentlemen of
the Chapel are given : Edward John, William Newerk, John Sidburgh,
Thomas Bladesmyth, John Penne, Henry Wilkyns, John Cornish,3
John Prate, Robert Fairfaux, John Petwyn, Thomas Sexton, William
Sturton, Robert Penne, John Fyssher, John Venner, John Fowler,
William Tebbe, William Browne.

My next list is published now for the first time. It occurs in a
volume of Wardrobe Accounts in the Lord Chamberlain's Office.4
The book is undated, but the association of the names of Newark,
Crane, and Cornish shows that the list belongs subsequent to the
one of 1504, in which Crane's name does not appear, and previous to

1 From the Calendar of Patent Rolls, with some aid from other source books, certain
of the more prominent officials of the Chapel can be traced back for some distance.

The folio whig is a list of deans, so far as I could trace them, with the dates of the
documents which contain their names: John de Wodeford (April 25, 1349), John de
Leek (June 23, 1356), Thomas de Lynton (August 20, 1380), John Boor (January 20,
1389), Richard Kyngeston (February 6, 1400), Richard Prentys (March 10, 1403),
Edmund Lacy (April 18, 1414), Robert Gilbert (May 30, 1421), Richard Praty (appointed
March 1, 1432; cf. 'Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council, Vol. IV), John Croucher
(July 12, 1440), Robert Ayscogh (May 19, 1447), William Say (July 13, 1449), William
Dudley (July 30, 1471), John Gunthorpe (November 10, 1481), William Chauntre
(May 16, 1483), Richard Hill (1489; cf. Cal. Inquisitions, H. VII, Vol. II), Thomas Jane
(November 7, 1496), Richard Nikke (called "late dean" on April 24, 1501), Geoffrey
Simeon (January 17, 1501).

Of these men, Boor, Kyngeston, Prentys, and Lacy came in direct succession, and
so did Gunthorpe and Chauntre. I am not sure of any of the others.

The succession of masters of the children is clear from John Plummer on. His
grant of office took effect September 29, 1444. Following him came Henry Abyngdon
(appointed March 16, 1455), Gilbert Banaster (September 29, 1478), Lawrence Squire
(September, 1486), William Newark (1493), William Cornish (September, 1509), William
Crane (Easter, 1523), Richard Bower (June 30, 1545). Cf. Wallace's Evolution of the
English Drama, passim.

1 have found only one reference to the master of song, who by the ordinances of
Edward IV (q.v.) is distinguished from the master of grammar. The Calendar of Patent
Rolls, under date of March 24, 1465, contains a grant for life to the king's servitor Robert
Bunnock, for his good services in the instruction of boys in the art of music to sing in
the king's chapel, of a yearly rent of 10 marks.

For other miscellaneous items connected with the personnel of the Chapel prior to
Edward IV, cf. Cambridge History of English Literature, VI, 280 flf. (Manly 's article on
"The Chapel Royal").

2 Printed in Henry Cart de Lafontaine's The King's Music, London, 1909.

» Is this correct ? Nothing is known of a John Cornish, whereas William Cornish
had been about court, presumably as member of the Chapel, since 1493.

«L. C. 2/1, fol. 202 6 (Lord Chamberlain's office, P.R.O.).

243

76 HARO!D N. HILLEBRAND

November, 1509, when Newark is reported to be dead.1 Among
the ordained priests are listed: Master Doctor Atwat[er], Dean.
Sir Richard Surlond, Sir Roger Norton, Sir John Kyte, Sir John
Coole, Sir William Post, Sir John annes, Sir John ffouler, Gospeller.
The gentlemen were: Robert ffeyrefax, William Newark, John
Sudburgh, William Cornysshe, Edward John, William Broun, John
Petroyn (?), William Crane, John Weyver, John penne, William
Sturton, John Smythe, Roberte penne, Thomas Sexton, John ffyssher,
Henry Stevynson, William Dobeney, Henry prentyce. There was
an unnamed sergeant of the Vestry. The epistolers were: Robert
hawkyns, John Buntyng, Nicholas hornclyff, and Geffrey Wryght,
groom. The children were: William Colman, William Maxe,
William Alderson, henry Merett, John Williams, Arthur lovekyn,
Nicholas Joe, John Graunger, Edward Coke, henry Andrewe.

The next list, taken from an accounting of liveries for the funeral
of Prince Henry in February, 1511, duplicates in the main the
preceding.2 The gentlemen were: Master Doctor Farefax, Edward
John, John Lloid, John Sidborough, William Browne, William
Cornysh, William Sturton, William Crane, John Pende, Thomas
Sexton, John Wever, John Fissher, Robert Pende, Henry Stevenson,
William Daubeney, Henry Prentisshe, Thomas Farthyng, John
Gyles, Robert Hawkyns, John Petwyn, Davy Burten. The children
were: William Colman, William Maxe, William Alderson, Henry
Meryell, John Williams, John Graunger, Arthur Lovekyn, Henry
Andrewe, Nicholas loy, Edward Cooke, James Curteys.

Another interesting list, unfortunately confined to the gentlemen,
gives us the names of the Chapel in 1520. It is taken from a docu-
ment relating to the Field of the Cloth of Gold.3 The italicized
names are those which occur in the 1509 (?) list: Sir Roger Norton,
subdean, Sir William Tofte, Sir John Cole, Sir John Muldre, Sir
Andrew Yong, Sir Thomas Hal, Sir William Blakenden, Sir Richard
Elys, Robert Fairefax, John Lloyd, John Sudborow, William Cornysh,
Robert Penne, John Wever, John Fisher, William Daubney, Thomas
Farthing, Henry Stevinson, Robert Hawkins, Davy Burton, John

1 Cambridge History of English Literature, VI, 282.

2 Printed also in Lafontaine's The King's Music.
'Brewer and Gairdner, op. tit., Ill, Part I, 245.

244

EARLY HISTORY OF CHAPEL ROYAL 77

Giles, Thomas Bury, John Tyl, William Colmavi, Thomas Cheyny,
William Hogeskyn, Robert Jones, William Crane, Sir Robert Cotes,
gospeller, Sir John Whetwood, epistoler, William Rothewel, John
Bunting, Nicholas Horneclif, William Lambe, Geoffrey Write. When
Parliament was held at Blackfriars on November 3, 1529, John
Bunting sat with Richard Gibson for Rumney.

Still another list dates from February, 15 Henry VIII (1524);
it forms part of the estreats of the subsidy leviable on the king's
household.1 The original I found to be in very bad condition, the
names much faded. Nevertheless I deciphered the following, which
are found in the 1520 list: Robert Penne, John Wever, John Fisher,
William Daubney, Henry Stevinson, Robert Hawkins, Davy Burton?
John Giles, Thomas Bury, John Tyl, William Coleman, William
Rothewell, and William Lambe. Newcomers were: Robert Phillip,
Nicholas (Woodruff?), John (Ricroft?), Richard (Home?), Robert
Walsingham, John Dale, Robert Skynner, William Pe(n ?), Thomas
Skelton, James Michell, Peter Dalton, John Dawson, John Grove,
Henry Grove, Thomas Inglisshe, Richard Veay.

One more list from the time of Henry VIII I add because it has
a double value, in that it indicates the scale of wages which obtained
among the men of the Chapel in 1526 and introduces some new and in-
teresting names:2 " Ministers of the King's chapel, 7%d. a day: — Ric.
Ward, Thos. Haule, Ric. Elles, .... y Dogget, Thos. Wescot, Emery
Tuckfyld, Andrew Trace, Nic. Archbold, Wm. Walker, Wm. Crane,
Robt. Pend [doubtless Penne], John Fisher, Hen. Stephinson,
Thos. Bury, Wm. Colman, Robert Johns, Robt. Phillipps, Avery
Burnett, Hugh Roodes, Thos. Byrd, Ric. Bower, Ric. Pygot, Edm.
Bekham, Robt. Pury, Wm. Barbor, John Fuller, Robt. Rychmount,
John Alyn, John Stephen. At 4Jd. a day: — Simon Gyldar, gospeller,
Ric. Greene, verger. At 3d. a day: — John Singer, epistoler, Ralph
Tapping, yeoman." Richard Bower appears here for the first time;
he was later the successor of Crane as master of the children. Hugh
Rhodes was the author of the metrical Book of Nurture and the
" Song of the Boy Bishop of St. Paul's. " I should like to connect the
name of Thomas Wescott with the more famous Sebastian Westcote

1 Excheq. Q.R. 69/23 (P.R.O.).

2 Brewer and Gairdner, op. cit., IV, Part I, §1939 (p. 870).

245

78 HAROLD N. HILLEBRAND

who was for many years the master of the children of St. Paul's
and the producer of their plays, but as yet I have been unable to
substantiate my guess. Thomas Bird, of course, is well known in
the history of music.

From other accounts during Henry's reign we glean occasional
names which go to swell our lists of Chapel members. Thus we
find Cornish being paid quarterly 33s. 4d. for "fynding & teaching of
William Saundres late childe of the Chapell. 'n Again,2 he is recorded
as having been paid, a° 6 Henry VIII, £6-13^ for "oone master
Gyles3 that plaid on thorgans in the kinges Chapell," and "oone
Corbroude a syngyng man" is paid 66s. Sd. by the hands of Cornish.
Other names we are familiar with are those of Robert Testwood and
John Marbeck, both singing men, who were arraigned and con-
demned in relation to the Mass in 35 Henry VIII.4 Robert White,
a composer famous in his day, is supposed to have been of Henry's
Chapel.5

4. THE CHAPEL UNDER THE LATER TUDORS AND JAMES I

By the accession of Edward VI the Chapel had pretty well
crystallized in its composition, and it changed little throughout
succeeding reigns. The standard which it thus maintained was
thirty-two gentlemen, besides eight or nine gospellers, vergers,
yeomen, etc., and twelve children. Mrs. Stopes prints a list of the
gentlemen of Edward's Chapel in her book on William Hunnis.6
At this time the master of the children was Richard Bower, who
received the same fees for his services as Cornish and Crane before
him — £40 wages, £9-13-4 for largess for the children at high feasts,
and £16 for breakfasts for the children. The gentlemen were these:
Emery Tuckfield, Nicholas Aurchbalde, William Walker, Robert
Chamberleyne, John Leide, William Gravesend, John Angell, Wil-
liam Hutchins, Robert Philipps, Thomas Byrde, Richard Bowyer,
Robert, Pirrey, William Barbor, Robert Richmond, Thomas Waite,

1 Excheq. Miscel., T.R., Vol. CCXV, p. 527.

2 Ibid., p. 371.

» The same, probably, as the John Gyles in the 1520 list.

4 Hall's Chronicle, p. 858.

5 Mrs. Stopes, William Hunnia, p. 17.
« Ibid., p. 21.

246 -

EARLY HISTORY OF CHAPEL ROYAL 79

Thomas Talles, Nicholas Mellowe, Thomas Wright, Robert Stone,
John Benbowe, John Sheppheard, William Mauperley, George
Edwards, Robert Morcocke, William Hynnes [Hunnis], Thomas
Manne, Richard Aylesworth, Thomas Palfreman, Roger Kenton,
Lucas Caustell, Richard Farrant, Edward Adams (these all at 7fd
the day); John Smith and Robert Bassocke (at 4|d. the day);
Thomas Causton, Richard Lucam, John Denham, Walter Thirleby,
and Tedder Morrison1 (at 3d. the day); and Hugh Williams (at
40s. the year).2

Mrs. Stopes has also printed, in the Athenaeum? a Chapel list
from the first year of Queen Mary. It is almost identical with the
one just given, except that instead of thirty-two gentlemen- there are
only twenty-nine, the missing names being those of John Leide,
Robert Philipps, and Thomas Manne, and, instead of John Smith
and Richard Lucam among the subsidiary officers, we find John
Singer, "gospeler preste, " and Richard Lever; but it is possible
that the last two pairs of names are the same, and have been wrongly
inscribed or wrongly read.

In none of these lists does the name of Richard Edwards appear;
yet he entered the Chapel soon after Mary's accession, for in the
roll of New Year's gifts for Philip and Mary, in 1556-57, his name is
included, along with Shepherd's of the Chapel, for presenting verses.4
Neither do we find the name of Christopher Tye, the famous organ-
ist; yet in 1553 when he published his metrical rendering of the
Acts of the Apostles, he called himself on the title-page " gentleman
of his Majesty's Chapel. " As we progress farther into the century
the familiar names become more numerous. Palfreyman, Tye,
Tallis, Farrant, Shepherd, Bird, were men who belong to the history
of music, or, as in the case of Farrant, to music and drama.

While there are no household ordinances of Queen Mary extant,
to my knowledge, like those of Henry and Edward, yet it seems as
though she intended to keep up the Chapel with the same liberality

1 In the list of Mary, referred to in the next paragraph, Mrs. Stopes gives the name
as Morris Tedder. I do not know which may be right.

2 In Rimbault's Old Cheque Book, p. x, is a Chapel list of the time of Edward which was
reprinted from Hawkins and Burney. It is identical with the list above except that
John Kye appears in place of John Leide.

s September 9, 1905, p. 347.

* Mrs. Stopes, William Hunnis, p. 23.

247

80 HAROLD N. HILLEBRAND

that her father used. For instance, she made special provision in the
first year of her reign for the transportation of the children at such
times as the court removed from London.1 But under the economical
rule of Elizabeth many of the perquisites heretofore belonging to the
children and their master were allowed to lapse, with what result we
may judge from the pathetic appeal of William Hunnis, the master,
in 1583. Although this petition has been frequently printed,2 it is
too important to omit from any history of the Chapel Royal.

Maye it please yor honores wilh'am Hunnys Mr of the Children of hir
highnes Chappell, most humble beseecheth to considr of these fewe lynes.

ffirst hir Mai'estie alloweth for the dyett of xij children of hir sayd
Chappell daylie vjd a peece by the daye, and xl11 by the yeare for theyre
apparrell and all other furneture.

Agayne there is no ffee allowed neyther for the mr of the sayd children
nor for his vssher, and yet neuertheless is he constrayned, over and besydes
the vssher still to kepe bothe a man servant to attend vpon them and lyke-
wyse a woman seruant to wash and kepe them cleane.

Also there is no allowance for the lodginge of the sayd Children, such
tyme as they attend vppon the Courte, but the mr to his greate charge is
dryuen to hyer chambers both for him self, his vssher Chilldren and servantes.

Also theare is no allowaunce for ryding Jornies when occasion serueth
the mr to trauell or send into sundrie partes within this Realme, to take vpp
and bring such children as be thought meete to be trayned for the service of
hir mazestie.

Also there is no allowaunce ne other consideracion for those children
whose voyces be chaunged, whoe onelye do depend vpon the charge of the
sayd Mr vntill such tyme as he may preferr the same with cloathing and
other furniture, vnto his no smalle charge.

And although it may be obiected that hir Mai'estes allowaunce is no
whitt less then hir M&iestes ffather of famous memorie therefore allowed:
yet considering the pryces of thinges present to the tyme past and what
annuities the mr then hadd out of sundrie abbies within this Realme, besydes
sondrie giftes from the kinge, and dyuers perticuler ffees besydes, for the
better mayntenaunce of the sayd children and office : and besides also there
hath ben withdrawne from the sayd chilldren synce her Mai'estes comming
to the Crowne xijd by the daye which was allowed for theyr breakefastes as
maye apeare by the Treasorer of the Chamber his accompt, for the tyme

1 Mrs. Stopes, William Hunnis, p. 252.

2 E.g., by Wallace, Evolution of the English Drama, pp. 156-58, and Mrs. Stopes,
William Hunnis, pp. 252-53. I have used Wallace's text as being literally faithful.
The original is in S. P. Dom. Eliz., CLXIII, No. 88. It is indorsed "1583 Novembr
The humble peticion of the Mr of the Children of hir highnes Chappell. "

248

EARLY HISTORY OF CHAPEL ROYAL 81

beinge. with other allowaunces incident to the office as appeareth by the
auntyent accomptes in the sayd office, which I heere omytt.

The burden heereof hath from tyme to tyme so hindred the Mrs of the
children viz mr Bower, mr Edwardes, my sellf and mr ffarant : that notwith-
standing some good helpes otherwyse some of them dyed in so poore case,
and so deepelie indebted that they haue not left scarcelye wherewith to
burye them.

In tender consideracion whereof, might it pleaes yor honores that the
sayde allowaunce of vjd a daye apeece for the Childrens dyet might be
reserued in hir Maiestes coffers during the tyme of theyr attendaunce. And
in Liew thereof they to be allowed meate and drinke within this honorable
householde for that I am not able vppon so small allowaunce eny longer to
beare so heauie a burden. Or otherwyse to be consydred as shall seeme best
vnto yor honorable wysdomes.

What success Hunnis had with his petition is not definitely
known. There seems to be good reason for thinking he had none;
else there had not been such great cause for rejoicing in the Chapel
when in 1604 King James granted a general augmentation.1 More-
over, the record of this grant in the Cheque Book declares that "the
intertainement of the Chappell was not augmented of many yeares
by any his Majesties progenitors." The following increases were
ordered: for the gentlemen, ten pounds, making their wages forty
pounds; for the children, four pence apiece per diem, making their
allowance ten pence; for the sergeant of the Vestry, ten pounds;
and for the yeomen and grooms of the Vestry four pence apiece per
diem. How the Chapel felt about these increases may be judged
from the fact that the page in the Cheque Book which bore the precious
grant was inscribed with the anathema: "Cursed be the partie that
taketh this leafe out of this booke." It was for them the most
important ordinance that had been issued since the Statutes of
Eltham.

The edict of James so reverentially recorded was not the only
good turn he did the Chapel, for he revived the practice of sending
the boys to the universities when their voices broke. The provisions
which formulate his decisions in this regard are attached to a writ of
impressment granted Nathaniel Gyles, as Chapel master, in Sep-
tember of 1604,2 just a few months before the great augmentation.

1 Cf. the Old Cheque Book, p. 60.

2 Privy Signet Bills, T.R., September 2, Jas. I, No. 40.

249

82 HAROLD N. HILLEBRAND

This interesting document, rarely even alluded to, has never been
printed in full. I select here the part which relates to our present
purpose :

And of the said Nathanaell Giles Master of the Children of our said
Chappell of our princly care for the advancment helpe and furtherance of
such Children as shalbe taken to serve in our said Chappell as aforesaid of
our especiall grace certain knowledg and meere motion we have willed
ordayned Constituted graunted and declared And by these presentes for us
our heires and successors do will ordayne graunt and declare that when and
so often as any of the Children of our said Chappell having served in the same
by the space of three yeres or more shall by reason of the Chaung of his or
their voice or voices become insufficient or unmeet for the service of us our
heires or successors in the same Chappell that then and from tyme to tyme
at all tymes it shall and may be lawfull unto the Master of the Children of
our said Chappell for the tyme being by and with the discretion and allow-
ance of the Deane of our said Chappell for the tyme being and in the vacancie
of a Deane of our said Chappell, then by and with the discretion and allow-
ance of two or more of our privy Councell to send or convey any such Child
or Children so becoming insufficient or unmeet for the service of us our
heires and successors in the same Chappell to any Colledg Hall or schoole
being of the foundacion of us or of any of our progenitors kinges or Queenes
of this our realme of England or whereof we, or any of our progenitors are
or have ben called and are accompted founders within any the universities
of Oxford or Cambridg or in any other place or schoole whatsoever within
this our Realme of England to be receaved admitted and placed in any of
them in the rome and place of a scholer of the foundacion of any such Colleg
hall or schoole and to give pay and allowance into the said Child or Children
and euery one of them to be sent as aforesaid all such wages lodging diet
instruction teaching and other allowances whatsoever as are paied given or
allowed to other scholers in the same Colledges halls or schooles by the
foundacions Statutes or orders of the same any law statute Act or ordinance
of or in the said Colledges hall or schooles or any of them to the contrary
hereof not withstanding. Prouided alwayes that there be not at any tyme
hereafter by force of this our ordinacion graunt Constitucion and declaracion
aboue one Child sent or brought to any Colledg hall or schoole within the
space of three yeres so to be placed admitted and allowed as aforesaid.
And we doe also of our speciall grace certain knowledge and meere mocion
will and ordayne declare and command by theise presentes unto all and
singular the Deanes Provostes. Wardens Masters and governers of all
and singular the said Colledges hall or Schooles by what name or names
soeuer they be called or knowne that they do receave admitt and place all
such Child or Children as shalbe sent or brought unto them by and with the
discretion and allowance as aforesaid.

250

EARLY HISTORY OF CHAPEL ROYAL 83

From the accession of Elizabeth on we find no more of the Chapel
lists which used to be included in the accounts of the royal household;
I cannot recall one such list after 1558. But fortunately at that
time the Old Cheque Book begins and supplies us with far more
information about members of the Chapel and their doings than the
accounts give; so that the record of the Chapel from 1560 on is
fairly complete, and may be consulted by anyone in Dr. Rimbault's
edition of the Cheque Book for the Camden Society.

5. THE BODLEIAN REGISTER OF THE CHAPEL ROYAL

In Rawlinson MS D318, fol. 25-47, is a puzzling document which
was not known to Rimbault, and which I have never seen referred
to by anyone else. It is evidently a transcript, though possibly in
part original, of certain accounts kept in the Chapel Royal. The
greater part consists of a list of deaths and appointments, precisely
similar to the Cheque Book, and identical with it in many cases, but
possessing many items wanting in the Cheque Book and in other ways
varying. The miscellaneous tables at the end, for example, which
give interesting suggestions of the economy and expenses of the
Chapel, are not found in the Cheque Book. The relations between
the two records, so much alike and so dissimilar, are puzzling in
the highest degree. I do not pretend to understand them.

The Bodleian manuscript, which for convenience I have called
the Register, is bound up with others of unequal sizes. The folios
are numbered straight through the book, the Register occupying
numbers 25 to 47. It is incomplete, has no title, and is carelessly
inscribed, in that part of it is written on the backs of folios, upside
down. The handwriting changes in places which are noted in my
transcript; in general the hands seem to be early or middle seven-
teenth century. The entries, at least as far as 1633, are copied in by
the same hand. Toward the end occurs the date 1635, which
seems about right for the whole document.

Important variations from the Cheque Book are pointed out in
the notes. All entries inclosed in brackets are not found in Rim-
bault's edition of the Cheque Book.
(Fol. 25)

1560 [mr Causter sworne Pistler the 25th of September].

1561 mr Pater noster was sworne gent the 24th of march & mr Jones Gospel-
ler. & Thomas Rawlins yeoman of the Chapell.

251

84 HAROLD N. HILLEBBAND

1561 [mr Rawlins sworne gent the 27th of September].

1563 mr Thomas wyles sworne gent the eight of march.

1563 mr merton died the 22th of September and mr Parsons sworne sworne

the 17th of October yeoman Pistler.
1563 mr walker was slayne the 27th of November [& mr Parsons sworne

gent the 8th of Januarie].

1563 Mr wm mundy sworne gent the 21th off ffebruary.

1564 Mr Thomas Sampson sworne gent the 24th of Aprill at Windsor.
1561 Thomas Birde Clerke of the check died1 & mr morkocke made clerk

of the Check.

1566 Mr Bower died mr of the Children and mr wm hunnis made mr the
15th of November.2

(Fol. 256)
1566 mr Hechins died the 9th of November & Nich. morgan sworne gent

the 9th of December.
1566 [James Causter sworne gent the 11th of December & John Ridley

sworne Pistler the same daye].

1566 Mr Ailsworth died the 21th of Januarie3 & mr Robert Greene sworne
gent the last of the same.

1567 Mr John Denman died the 28th of maye. & John Addie sworne in
his Roome the 27th of July.4

1567 Subdeane Angell died the 17th of August, & mr Morris sworne Sub-
deane the last of the same.

15686 Subdeane Morris died the 6th of maye and mr Grauesend swo: in
his Roome the 15th eidem.6

1568 Mr wm Jewett7 sworne gent the 18th daye of June.8

1569 Subdeane Grauesend died the 8th day of Aprill & Mr Tirwitt sworne
Subdeane the 13th of October.

1569 Hugh zullie priest died the 11th of October & John Ridley sworne gent

in his roome.9
1569 Mr Richard ffarrant sworne the 5th of November in Mrcaustons

Roome.

1 "in Februarie."

a This is even worse than the Cheque Book, which dates his death 1563. He died
1561. The present entry is a telescoping of two in C.B., one of the death of Bower, and
one of the death of Richard Edwards in 1566 and the appointment of Hunnis.

s"22d."

4 "June."

» C.B. inserts before this entry: "Jo: Hottest priest of Poules was sworne the 4*
of December in Mr. Angell's place, Ao 11."

• "and Mr. Hottost substitute at Greenwich."

7 "Ivett of West Chester."

8 "in Mr. Norrice place."

» C.B. has it that Robert Goodale was sworn in " Sully es" place on the 13th.

252

EARLY HISTORY OF CHAPEL ROYAL 85

<Fol. 26)
1569 Roger Centon died the 11th1 of ffebr. & Robt Goodall2 sworne gent.

in his place the 25th eidem.

1569 [Nicholas Brighton sworne yeoman Pistler the 25th of ffebruarie].
1569 Robert Parsons drowned at Newerk vpon trent3 & wm Bird sworne

Gent in his place the 22th of ffebruary.

1569 Wm Ednye bought Causters roome the first of October.
1571 Henry Aired died the 30th of march and Richard Granwall sworne

gent at his first oth the 8th of Aprill.
1571 Robert Goodall died the 19th of September [& Nich. Beighton sworne

gent.] & Giles Cacott4 sworne pistler the 13th of October.
1573 Giles Cacott died the 20th of June, & Barth. Mason sworne in his

Roome the 10th of October.
1575 John Ridley died the 11th of Januarie [& Barth mason sworne gent.]

& wm Rodinghurst6 yeoman the 28th of ffebru.
15776 John Addie died the 9th of ffebru. [& wm Rodinghurst sworne gent.]

1578 & John savell yeoman the 28th of march.

<Fol. 266)

1579 John Russell died the 30th of march [& John savill sworne gent.]
& Richard Morrice sworne yeoman the same day.7

1580 [wm Bulman sworne gent Extraordinarie the 24th of Aprill by the
Subdeane wth out Commanding either from the Queene or Deane
wch was wth out example.]8

1580 Thomas Rawlins died the 22th of August & Ellis Stempe sworne gent

the 9th of November.
1580 John Savell was slaine the 25th of August [& Richard Morrice sworne

gent] & Crue sharpe yeoman, the 9th of November.
1580 Richard ffarant died the 30th of November [& Crue Sharp sworne

gent the 26th of ffebruary] & Anthony Todd yeoman the same daye.9

1580 wm Jones died the last of ffebrwary & leonard da vies sworne Gospeller
in his roome. the 15th of maye.10

1581 [Mrmorgan died the 9th of maye, & Anthony Todd sworne Gent
the 15th of maye. in his Roome.]

1 "16th."

2 "Nich. Beighton .... from Lichfield."

» " the 25th of Januarie. " « " Bodinghurst. ' '

«"Carott." «"1578."

7 "Richard Morrice sworne in his place the first of Aprill followinge A° 21, from
Glocester. "

» This interesting item is one of many which do not appear in the Cheque Book.

9 "havinge allowed Deer, and Januarie before at the Greenclothe, and wages from
the deathe of Farrant. "

10 "and received paie from the 10th of Marche before,"

253

86 HAROLD N. HILLEBRAND

<Fol. 27)
15821 Mr morecock Clerke of the Cheque died the 15th of June [& mr more

was made Clerke of the Check in his Roome.]2
15821 Wm Edney died the xiiijth3 of November of the Plague.
15824 John More, Clerke of the Check died the second of October, & [Thomas

Samson was elected Clerke of the Check in his Roome.]5
15824 Edmond Browne was sworne gent in mr Moore-Cocks roome the

25th of december, & Thomas Woodesson, & Robert Tallentire sworne

yeoman in Mr Ednies & mr moores Roomes the 25th of the same

december.6
15837 wm Maperley died the last of maye, & wm Barnes sworne gospeller

the 11th of October ffolowinge.

1583 Subdeane Tirwitt died the 10th of January & Robert Greene sworne
Subdeane in his roome,8 [& wm Barnes gent, Anthony harryson Gospel-

1584 ler] & Solomon Compton the 15th of maye.9

1584 Wm Randell sworne Pistler the 17th of maye10 [in Mr Richmondes
Roome.]11

(Fol. 276)

1585 Mr Tallis died the 20th12 of November & mr Heveseed13 sworne pistler
the last of the same.14

158616 Mr Rodenhurst died in January, & John Bull sworne in his place.16

1586 Isaack Burgis sworne in January.17

2 In place of the bracketed item C.B. has: "and Edmund Browne sworne in his
place the 25th of December A<> 24°. "
s» 13th."

5 In place of the bracketed item: "and Robert Tallentier sworne in his place the
25* of December A° 24°. "

6 These particulars are contained in C.B. but arranged under different entries.
C.B. adds: "Note that these three persons had bothe wages and bord wages from the
daie of the others deathes untill the daie of the swearinge by my Lord Chamberlaines
warrant to the Greenclothe. " Woodson was "of Poules. "

7 An entry precedes: "1583. Anthony Harrison sworne the of October in
Mr. Morrice roome, who fledd beyond the seaes A° 25°, from Winsore. "

8 C.B. merely says: "Robert Greene sworne Subdeane the 14th of Februarie in
Mr. Tirwitts roome."

9 C.B. has: "1581 Salomon Compton was sworne pysteler the 15* of Maie
A° 24°, from Cambridge."

10 "the 15* of Februarie."

11 In place of the item in brackets: "in Mr. Tirwitts roome, from Exon." This is
obviously wrong; Green was subdean hi Tirwitt's place.

12 "23d." ""1585."

" " Eveseed. " ie " Childe there. "

14 " Childe there. " IT « • in Mr. Richmondes roome. ' '

254

EARLY HISTORY OF CHAPEL ROYAL 87

1587 Tymothy Greene sworne the 12th of June in Mr Couchis1 Roome.

1588 George water-house Admitted gentleman at his first othe in Solomon
Comptons Roome2 who was displaced.

1588 Edward Peirce sworne the 16th of march in Ellis Stemps Roome.

1589 Robert Allison sworne the 12th of December in Mr Palfrymans Roome,
[& John Stephens sworne the same daye in Ordinary by the Lord
Chamberlains Command, ffor the neaxt place that should become
voyde.]

1590 [Mr Wyles died in August] & John Stephen sworne in his place the
11th of the same.

1591 John hewlett sworne the 23th of maye in Mr Blithmans Roome.
1591 Richard Plumley sworne the [10th] of August in Mr Jewetts Roome.

(Fol. 28)

1591 Anthony Anderson sworne the 12th of October in Mr Mundayes
Roome.

1591 Thomas Gould sworne the 14th of November in Mr Beightons Roome.

1592 Thomas Morley sworne the 24th of July in Subdeane Greens Roome,
& mr Anderson sworne Subdeane.3

1592 Peter wright sworne the 23th of November in Mr Benbowes Roome.

1592 Thomas Maddoxe sworne the 10th of Januarie in Mr hottofts4 Roome.

1593 Anthony Anderson Subdeane died of the Plague the 10th of October,
& Leonard Davies sworne Subdeane the 15th of the same Moneth,
[and wm lawrence Pistler.]6

1593 James Davies sworne the 29th of Januarie in Tymothe Greens Roome.

1595 John Amery sworne the 4th of december in in Mr Maddoxe Roome.

1596 Robert Paternoster died the last of July & robert Stuckey sworne in
his place the 20th of August.

(Fol. 286)

1597 wm hunnis died the 6th of June,6 & Nathaniell Giles sworne7 in his
Roome the 9th of the same.

1598 John Bauldwin sworne the 20th of August in Robert Tallentires Roome.8

1599 ffrancis wynbowrow9 sworne Pistler in Anthony Todds Roome the
26th of march.

i ' ' Gooches. " 2 "in July. ' '

» C.B. splits this entry into two. The second runs: "1592. Anthony Anderson
sworne Subdeane the 26th of July in Subdeane Greenes roome."

« "Mr. Hottost's place, from Heryford. "

s A separate entry in C.B.: "1593. Mr. Laurence from Poules was sworne the
17th of Octr. in Mr. Anderson's place."

« "Master of the Children."

i "gent and Master of the Children."

s "Robert Tallentire died the 15* of August, and Jo. Baldwin sworne in his place
the 20th of the same, from Winsore."

»"Widborow."

255

88 HAI*)LD N. HILLEBRAND

1600 Edward Peirce yelded vp his place for the mrship of the Children of
Poules, & John heathman sworne in his place the 15th of August.

1601 George waterhouse died the 18th of ffebru. & Arthur Cocke sworne in
his place the eight of march.

1601 Isaack Burgis, drowned Cominge out of the lowe Countries before

1602 Christmas, & Stephen Boughton sworne in his place the 25 of Aprill.
1602 George wooddesson was sworne the 7th of October in Thomas Morlays

Roome.
1602 wm lawes sworne the first of Januarie in Thomas Sharps Roome.

1602 Anthony kirkeby sworne the [9th] of march in John heathmans Roome.

1603 John wooddesson sworne the 2d of July in George Bucks Roome.
1603 Edmund Shergold sworne the first of Januarie in wm Barnes Roome.

(Fol. 29)

1603 Edmund Hooper sworne the first of March in wm Randolls Roome.

1604 Orlando Gibbons sworne the 21th of March in Arthur Cocks Roome.1

1605 Richard Coton was sworne the 12th of November in Bartholemy
Masons Roome.2

[About this tyme Rob. Hand yeoman of ye vestry dyed and John
Davies sworne grome in his place, who after wardes sould his place
to Jan Nicholas and the same John Davies was sworne yeoman of
the vestry extraordinary.]3

1605 Thomas wooddesson solde his place to wm west [who was to enter
into Pistlers wagis the first of Aprill followinge.]4

1606 Edmond Browne died the 27th of Aprill, & Randoll Tinker sworne in
his place the same daye.

1606s wm lawrence died the 10th of November, & David henly sworne in his
place [probationer for one yeare6] the third of December.

1606 Richard Granwall died the second of march, & Thomas Paine sworne
in his Roome the 27th of the same. 1607.

1607 George Cook was sworne the 21th of Januarie, in Edmond Shergolds7
Roome.

i" Arthur Cock died the 26* of Januarie, and Orlando Gibbons sworne in his
roome the 21»* of Marche followinge."

2 "Earth. Mason, Priest, died the last of October, and Rich. Coton, Minister, from
Winsore was sworne in his place the 12th of November. "

s A note inserted in the manuscript, running across the top of the page and down the
right margin.

4 " Who was sworne in his place the 20th of Marche. "

fi An entry in C.B. precedes this: "Randoll Tinker died of the Plague the 20th of
Sept., and Luke Jones of Poules was sworne hi his place the last of the same."
• Bracketed in manuscript, but also not in C.B.
i He "died the 19th of Januarie."

256

EARLY HISTORY OF CHAPEL ROYAL 89

1608 [John Patten eldest yeoman of the vestrie made over his place the
first of maye vnto Christofer Clarke, whoe was then sworne Groome,
& henry Aired eldest yeoman & Jan Nicholas youngest yeoman.
And the same tyme John Patten was sworne yeoman againe extra-
ordinarie.]

<Fol. 296)

1608 [Ralph ffletcher Sergeant of the vestry made over his place vnto
Cuthbert Joyner, who was sworne Sergeant the 26th of June, & Ralph
ffletcher was the same daye sworne Sergeant extraordinarie.]

1608 Thomas gould died the 28th of July, & John Clarke sworne the 24th of
August.1

1609 Thomas Paine died [the 28th of July, & John Clarke sworne the 24th of
August.2]

1609 Robert Allison solde his place the 8th of ffebru vnto humfrie Bache,
being the same daye sworne [Gospeller at the first.]

1609 Robert Stuckey died the last of ffebru & Thomas Peirce sworne the
24th of march.

1610 [Christofer Clark groome of the vestry resigned his place the 22th of
december, & wm lowther sworne theirin the same daye.]

1611 Wm lawes resigned his place the 5th of maye vnto Ezechiell waad.
who was sworne [Pistler] the same daye, [to enter into paye the first
of July neaxt after the date Aforesayd by order of our Deane.]

<Fol. 30)

1611 [Henry Aired yeoman of the vestry for manie disorders, & for sus-
picion of stealing of three Coopes out of his Mates vestry at Greenwcn,
was put out of his place the 7th of June, & wm lowther sworne that
daye.]

1611 [Henry Eveseed was sworne groome of the vestry the 19th of June.

1611 Richard Plumley died the third of October, & John ffrost sworne in
his Roome the 5th of November.

1613 Robert Stone of the age of iiij xvij yeares died the second of July, and
Mathew White Minister was elected & Admitted Gospeller at the
first the second of November followinge.3

1 "Childe of the Chappell."

2 This entry has evidently been botched by the scribe's slipping into the one above it.
The C.B. reads: "Tho. Paine died the 4«> of Januarie, and George Sheffeild of Durham
was sworne in his place the 6th of Feb. followinge."

3 "and was sworne the 27th daie of December then next ensuinge: the wages of Mr.
Stone from his death to Mr. Whit's admission was disposed of by the Deane of his Majestes
Chappell."

257

90 HAROLD N. HILLEBRAND

June John Bull Doctor, went byond the seas wthout leave, & was admitted

1613 into the Archdukes service,1 & Peter Hopkins was sworne in his
Roome the 27th of December followinge the wagis2 in the meane time
disposed of by the Deane.

1614 Mathew white resigned his place vnto my lord Deane. the 25th of
September, & wm Crosse his Lo: PS servant was Admitted & sworne
in his place the 27th of the same.

1615 [wm ward sworne Groome of the vestuarie extraordinarie for the
tuning of the Organs by warrant from the Deane.]

<Fol. 306)

1614 Henry Eveseed died the xviijth of November And wm Heather was
sworne in his place the 27th of march ffolowinge the wages in the

1615 meane tyme was disposed of by the Deane.

16153 Thomas Sampson Clerke of the Check was drowned the 24th of
Aprill, & John Myners was sworne in his place the 4th daye of June
followinge, & John Hewlett (havinge executed the place of Clark of
the Cheke ffor Mr Sampson about eight years was Allowed to be
Cherk (sic) of the Check by the Consent of the Companie.

1615 John Myners died the second of July, & Thomas Daye sworne in his
place the 30th of September followinge, the wagis, &c [vt supra]4

1615 John Baldwin died the 28th of August, & Martin Otto sworne the
30th of September.5

1615 [John Nicholas eldest yeoman of the vestry solde his place vnto
Richard Patten, who was sworne Groome the xxxth of September,
& henry eveseed then sworne youngest yeoman.]6

1616 David Henley died the xijth of August, & John Greene being Allowed
the wagis of the Pistler by the deane, & standing vppon probaczon
of his maners & good behaviowr for one yeare, [did soe misdemeane
himselfe & also married a second wife (the first living) was dismissed
his Maties service the 27th of September.]7

<Fol. 31)

1616 Edmond Nelham was sworne in John Greenes Roome the 5th8 of
November.

1 "and entered into paie there about Michaelmas."

2 "from Michaelmas unto the daie of the swearing of the said Peter Hopkins."
»Two entries precede this in C.B.: "1615. John Miners gent was sworne gent in

ordinarie the 28* of Marche for the next place in the Chappell, of what parte soever."
" 1615. John Amyon of Westchester was sworne gent extraordinarie the 13* daie
of Aprill."

* I.e., " the wages disposed by the Deane for that quarter. "

6 "by the procurement of our gracious Ladle Queene Ann. "

* Note that a Henry Eveseed died November 18, 1614.

7 The bracketed facts are contained in a separate entry in C.B.

* "6th."

258

EARLY HISTORY OF CHAPEL ROYAL

16171 Peter wright died the 27th of Januarie & waiter Porter sworne in his
place the first day of febru.

16202 Martin Otto died the second daye of July, and Roger Nightingall
Sworne in his place the xxth of the same.

[About this tyme Lancelott lo: BP of winton was sworne Deane of
the chappell in the presence of the Earle of pembroke lo : Chamberlain
in the vestry at Whitehall, by the subd of the Chappell.]3

1620 [Henry Eveseed for many disorders comitted & Approved against
him, was dismissed from his Mates service the third of march, &
Thomas Pannell was sworne Groome, & Richard Patten yeoman.]

1621 John ffrost Clerk, was sworne in Ordinarie the 26th of Aprill, for the
next place of a base that should fall voyd in his mates Chappell.

1621 Edmond Hooper died the 14th of July, & Thomas Tomkins, was

sworne in his place, August the 2d.
1621 Anthony Harrison died the 20th of ffebru. & John ffrost was sworne

in his place the 14th of Aprill 1623, the wagis in the meane tyme was

disposed of by the deane for prickinge of songs, & for a newe sett of

bookes for the Chappell.4

<Fol. 316)
1623 Wm Bird6 died the 4^ day of July, & John Croker was Admitted

probationer in his Roome the 24th of December.6

1623 John Amery died the 18th of July, and Raphe Amner sworne the
16th of December, the wagis disposed of by the lord Deane.

1 C.B. has the following entry preceding this:

"1616. Walter Porter, by warraunt from the reverend Father in God James Lord
Bisshopp of Winton and Deane of his Majestes Chappell, was sworne gent of his Majestes
said chappell in ordinarie, without paye, for the next place that shall happen to be and
shall fall voyd by the deathe of any tenor that now is in ordinarie in the said chappell,
and tooke and receaved his oathe to that effect the 5th daie of Januarie the yeare above-
said, and paid for his oathe five poundes and other duties."

2 C.B. has these entries preceding:

" 1619. Roger Ni(gh)tengall was sworne the 29th day of June in ordinary for the
next place of a base that shall fall voyd in his Majestes Chappell. "

" 1620. Memorandum, that of late ther(e) was a question proposed that Jo. Hewlett
was not lawfully elected to be dark of the check uppon the death of Mr. Sampson, who
died five yeares past, wheruppon ther was a vestery called by Mr. Davies, Subdeane, on
the 20* of June 1620, and ther(e) by a scruteny he was ellected and allowed to be a clerk
of the check by the major part of the gent, being then 25 in number. ' '

"1620 June 29. Thomas Peirse, servant to the Right Reverend Father in God
Lancellott Bishop of Winton and Deane of his Majestes Ordinary, was sworne a gent of
his Majestes Chappell hi Ordinary, to enter into pay uppon the deathe of Mr. James
Davies, if he chance to live so longe. "

8 Inserted hi a different hand.

* "and other disposings and allowances by his said Lordship."
6 "a Father of Musick"

• "for a yeare of probacion of his good behaviour and civill carriage, or else to resigne
and yeald up the promise graunted to him at the yeares end, and so to receave the wages
of the pisteler hi the meane tyme"

259

92 HAROLD N. HILLEBRAND

1623 Leonard Davies Subdeane died the ixth of November And Stephen

Boughton Mr of Aries was sworne in the place of Subdeane1 *by

Lancelott Lo: B. of Winton and dean of ye chappell*2 And John

Cooke sworne Pistler the 16th of December.3
1623 James Davies died the 24th of March, & Thomas Peirce Jun sworne

in his place the 26th.4
1625 Orlando Gibbons died the vth of June,5 & Thomas warrick sworne

in his place the first of July & to Receave the paye of Pistler.
1625 John Croker died the 25th of August, & George wooddesson Jun

sworne in his place the 20th of November.6
1625 John Cooke died the 12th of September, & henry lawes was sworne

in his place the first of Januarie ffollowinge.7
1625 Peter Hopkins died the 25th of November, & Richard Boughton was

sworne the 27th of June8 followinge, the wagis in the meane tyme

disposed of by the Deane.

<Fol. 32)

1625 [Memorandum that vpon the xixtn of November by king Charles
warrant vnder his hand signed was Thomas Meller sworne Joynt
Sergeant of his Mates vestrie, & Robert Colman & Silvester Wilson
yeomen of the same, & Thomas Meller to receafle such wagis as doth
belonge to the sergeant, from his Mates first entrance vnto his Crowne ;
& Robert Colman, & Silvester Wilson to receafle xijd a peece per diem,
& v11 a peece per Annum for their ffee, & they to haue prioritie of
place aboue the Sergeant & yeomen Respectively accordinge as other
his servantes in other places.]

16269 [Roger Evans by warrant from the Lo: deane was sworne Bellringer
the 20th daye of Aprill vppon the daeth of Sampson Rowden.]

'"the 14* of Deer. "

2 *. . . .*, an insertion by another hand. The same meaning attaches wherever

» "with this proviso, that the whole wages to the end of the quarter should be given
unto Mr. Subdeane Davies wiffe by our Lord Deane his order"

• "in the presence of Rich. Coton, substitute, John Stephens, John Hewlett, Frauncis
Widborow, Wm. West, Roger Nightingale, Tho. Tomkins, Luke Jones and Ralph Amner. "

«" being then Whitsonday, at Canterbury, wher the Kinge was then to receave
Queene Mary who was then to com out of Fraunce"

• "pisteler and gospeller, by the death of Mr. John Cooke, and lastly gent uppon
the death of Mr. Hopkins; the wages in the meane tyme was imployd in pricking of
songes by my Lord our Deanes order. "

» "Pistoler, and Mr. Warrick gent, and George Wooddeson, the younger, gospeller,
as above said: the wages in the meane tyme was disposed of by our Lord Deane. "
« "the 29* of Aprill, 1626. "

• The following entry occurs in C.B.: " 1625 Memorandum, that Mr. John Tomkins,
Organist of St. Paule London, was sworne extraordinarie gentleman of- his Majestes
Chappell for the next place of an organist there, or the place of Anthony Kirkby, which
of them shall first fall voyde. "

260

EARLY HISTORY OF CHAPEL ROYAL 93

1626 [Memorandum that the Right Reverend father in God Doctor An-
drewes, Bishop of winton & Deane of his Maties Chappell died the
25th daye of September at ffower of the Clock in the Morninge.]

(Fol. 326)
1626 [Md that Wm Lord Bishop of Bathe & Wells was sworne deane of his

Ma**8 Chappell, in the presence of the lo: Chamberlaine in the

vestrie the 6th of October *by Stephen Boughton subd*.]
1626 ffrancis wilbowrow died the 28th of October & John Tomkins sworne

pistler in his place. Richard Boughton Gospeler & henry Lawes

Gent the third of November.

1626 Crue Sharpe died the 21th of december, & thomas Raiment sworne
epistler in his place the 30th of Januarie, Jo: Tomkins Gospeler &
Richard Boughton gent.

1627 Luke Jones died the 18th daye of July, And Richard Sandy sworne
ePistler the 19th of July Thomas Raiment Gospeller, & John Tomkins
gentleman.

1627 Wm Heather Doctor, died [the 27th] of July, And Thomas Laughton
sworne ePistler in his place the [12th] of October followinge the wagis
in the Interim was disposed of by the deane. Richard Sandy was
sworne gospeler & Thomas Raiment was sworne gent.
<Fol. 33)

1627 John Hewlett Clarke of the Cheque died the 11th of ffebruarie, &
John Stephens was elected by the Companie, Clerk of the Cheque in
his Roome. Nathaniell Pownall sworne Pistler, Thomas laughton
Gospeller & Richard Sandy gent the 12th of the same.

1626 [Be it remembered that vppon the ixth of July John Burward was
sworne Groome of his Ma*63 vestery Extraordinarie for the tuninge
& mendinge of his Mates Organs when hee shalbe required, as dothe
more largely Appeare by the lo: deanes warrant for yt purpose.]

1630 Humfrie Bache died the first of Aprill & George Nutbrowne was
sworne epistler in his Roomee (sic) Thomas Laughton Gentleman &
Nathainell Pownall Gospeller the sayd first of Aprill.

1633 Doctor Peirc surrendered his place in September & Thomas Holmes
was sworne pistler in his Rome, [Nathainell Pownall Gent, & George
Nutbrowne Gospeller. Tho: Holmes to enter in Paye the first of
Januarie next ffolowinge.]

<Fol. 336)1

1633 [Dr. Giles mr of the Children deceased Ja. 24. Thomas day was
sworne mr of ye children in his place. George Nuttbrowne was
sworne gent. Thomas Holmes gospeller and Thomas Hazard Epis-
tler the the (sic) 25 of ffebruary.]

i Prom here on the entries are in another hand, seemingly the same which made
previous annotations. In C.B. there is a gap in the entries from 1633 to 1638.

94 HAROUD N. HILLEBRAND

1635 [Thomas pounell eldest yeoman of y6 vestry deceased in January.
Thomas Walker was sworne eldest yeoman John pountney youngest
yeoman, and Hugh Jenkins Groome sworne ffeb. 13.]

1636 [Thomas Mailer seriaunt of the vestry deceased about midsommer
and Thomas Walker was sworne seriaunt in his place Decemb. 24.
beinge xpas eve, and the dead pay of the seriauntes place was disposed
of by ye Deane of the Chappell. Hugh Jenkins was sworne youngest
yeoman, Jo. pountney eldest yeoman, and Roger Judd was sworne
groome ffebruary 18.]

1636 [John Stevens a tenor and Clerke of the Check deceased

Maij, mr Thomas Day was sworne Clerke of the Check. Tho.

1637 Holmes gent. Tho. Hazard ghospeller and Epistler April 12, 1637.
The dead pay was disposed of by ye Deane of the Chappell.]

<Fol. 34)

1637 [Thomas Holmes a base deceased Martij 24 beinge the Eve of Easter
and the Annuntiation Tho Hazard was sworne gent, Rich. Jenninges
ghospeller and John Cobb Organist was sworne Epistler Sept. 15,
1638, the dead pay was disposed of by the Deane of ye Chappell.]1

1638 [Thomas Walker seriaunt of the vestry deceased in and
John pountney eldest yeoman was sworne seriaunt Maij 3° Hugh
Jenkins eldest yeoman and Thomas kithermister was sworne Groome
Maij 13°.

1638 John Clark [a tenor deceased of the plague] in July, John Cobb was
sworne gospeller [and Richard portman organist was sworne Epistler
vpon Michaelmas day.]

1638 John Tomkins [an excellent Organist] deceased Sept. 27. [John Cobb
was sworne gent] Rich portman Ghospeller, [and John Hardinge a
Counter tenor was sworne Epistoler Oct. 1°.]

16382 [Thomas Laughton a countertenor in his fury slinging a payre of sizers
at his wife strake her in the head whereof she dyed wtnin 3 dayes after
vz the last of December, 1638 for wch he was deprived of his place in
ye Chappell, and Richard Wattkine was sworne a probationer in his

1639 place March 15. 1639.]

<Fol. 346)

1639 [George Woodeson a Counter tenor dyed the and Mathew Peare
was sworne probationer in his place beinge a tenor the 10 of June 1640.]

1639 [John ffrost a tenor dyed the 7th of March 1639. Thomas Kither-
minster a groome of ye vestry resigned his place and William

Williams was sworne groome in his place the (sic)]

1 C.B. has in place of this entry: "1638. Thomas Holmes dyed at Salsburye at
our Lady Day, and John Hardinge was sworne in his place."

2 From here on the entries are in varying shades of ink and different hands; probably
they are the original, contemporary entries. The C.B. has a hiatus between 1638 and
1660, which the Register fills as far as it goes.

262

EARLY HISTORY OF CHAPEL ROYAL

1640 [William alias Webb a tenor was sworne a probationer in John

ffrostes place the 17 of June anno domim 1640.]

1640 [William Kros a Counter tenor deceased the 14 day of June 1640.
he dyed in Wells.]

[Hugh Jenkins deceased eldest yeoman of the vestry the 27th of
August William Williams was sworne yeoman and Augustine Cleve-
land was sworne groome the of October, 1640.]

1640 [Augustine Cleveland was sworne groome of the vestry the (sic)]

<Fol. 35)

1641 [Richard Boughton a base deceased ye 24th of July 1641 he heald both
Windsor and the chappell togeather.]

1641 [George Woodson a tenor deceased the first day of ffebruary 1641.

he heald both the Chappell and Westminster togeather.]
1641 [James Try a tenor was sworne a probationer in George Woodsons

place the day of ffebruary who heald togeather wth the Chappel

a place in ye Church and Quire of Westminster.]

1641 [Thomas Lowe a base of St Paules church London was sworne into
the place of Richard Boughton ye day of ffebruary.]

1642 [John ffrost gent of ye Chappell and Chanter of Westminster church
held togeather wtn ye Chappell deceased the viijtlx day of May beinge
Sunday about one of ye Clock in the morninge. he was a base and of
extraordinary sufficiency for his quality allso of honesty and good ( 7)1

1642 And Woodcock a master of Arts of Kinges College in Cambridge
a countertenor was sworne probationer in his place vpon Michaelmas
day after.]

1643 [James Trie a tenor deceased about September he held both west-
minster and the chappell togeather.]

<Fol. 356)
1643 [William West a tenor deceased in November.]

(Fol. 47} 2

A direction for the Castinge vp of the perditions Euery moneth

ffirst make one Entire Sum of all the perdicions both of dayly wayters and
by wayters.

Next deuide that sum amongst the dayly wayters by Equall Portions.
Then deduct from Euerie one his perdicions and write his perquisitts before
his name.

1 Word illegible.

2 The following pages are separated from the preceding by several blank leaves.
The entries are inverted so that one must turn the manuscript upside down, and beginning
at the back (fol. 47) read toward the parts transcribed above. This part of the Register,
too, is without title or explanation. It is not found in the Cheque Book.

96 HARCC.D N. HILLEBRAND

Lastly Cast vp the perdiczons of the wayters, and the perdicions of those

dayly wayters whose negligence haue depriued them of perquisites And

yf that Sum make vpp the Some of the perquisites then ye Accoumpt is Right.

Maye Anno dowmi 1635.

<Fol. 466)

The President for the Monethly Dyett

Diete Rectorum Clericorum Generosorum et Aliorum Capelle Domini Regis
Caroli. A Primo die Mensi's Januarij vsque ad vltimum diem eiusdem
menst's viz pro xxxi° diebus inclusive, Anno Quinto Regni Caroli Regis &c.
Anno dommi 1629.

A President when ther is A remove in any moneth

Diete Rectorum &c till you come to inclusive, et pro vna Remocione A
Grinwich vsque hampton Court, viz pro xv milliarum, Anno Sexto Regni
Caroli Regis &c Anno dommi 1630.

A President for the Quarters ffee

Vadea Rectorum Clericorum Generosorwm et Aliorum Capelle dommi Regis
Caroli A Primo die Mensi's Julij vsque ad vltimum diem mensi's septembris

viz pro iiij xij diebus inclusive. Anno Sexto regni Caroli regis &c. Anno
domini 1630.

A President when ther is Two Removes in A moneth

Diete Rectorum Clericorum generosorum et Aliorum Capelle domini Regis
Caroli, A primo die mensz's Octobris vsque ad vltimum diem eiusdem Mensi's,
viz pro xxxj diebus inclusive, et pro vna remocione A grinwich vsque Windsor,
et retro, Windsor vsque Grinwich, deinde pro Altera remocione A Grinwich
vsque hampton Court in toto miliarium Ixv. Anno decimo Regni Caroli
regis &c. Anno domzni 1633.

<Fol. 46)

Children Remoovings Myles

xvs ffrom Grinwich to Windsor xxv

Swmma iiij11 xs xd

xv*1 vjs ffrom Windsor to hampton court xj

Swmma xls vd

ixs ffrom Windsor to Richmount xiiij

Swmma ljs viijd

xvd vjs from Richmount to Grinwich xj

Swmma xls vd

ixs ffrom Grinwich to hampton court xv

Swmma liiij s vjd

264

EARLY HISTORY OF CHAPEL ROYAL 97

(Fol. 46)

Children Remoovings Myles

ijs vjd vjs from hampton court to whithall xij

Swmma xliiij8 vjd

iijs from Whitehall to Grinwich v

Swrama xviij8 ijd

ijs vjd ijjs from Whitehall to richmount vj

Stwraia xxvj s iiijd

<fol. 456} iijs from hampton court to Richmount iiij

Summa xvs iiij8

xij8 from Whitehall to Windsor xx

Swmma iiju xij8 viijd

when it doth happen that the Remoove is.
a-1 1-6-7. or -12 myles or the like, the odde
pence to the Children and yeomen, are the
Clarke of the Checks ffee, as for example,
llooke one the margent of the other syde.
(Fol. 45)

The xij Children for board wagis haue xd apeece per diem viz xs per diem.
The gent of the Chappell, the Gospeller, the Epistler, the Sergeant of the
Vestuarie, to each of them, haue at every Remoove for Beveridge a penny a
myle.

The yeomen and Groome of the vestuarie haue to each of them for every
fyve myles Remoovinge iiijd — TO each Child for every fyve myles iijd —
And if there be any odd myle more or lesse they haue a penny a peece for the
same, As for example, they haue for remooving fower mile iijd, for sixe miles
iiijd.

The master of the children hath for their Apparell out of the kyngs
exchequer xl11 per Aiumm.

<Fol. 446)

The Clarke of the Checke hath out of every months bord wagis from
each Gentleman Gospeler, the Epistler and Sergeant -viijd- & for each yeoman
& Groome out of every moneth iijd, & from the master of the Children for
every moneth ijs vjd.

Out of wch paymentes the Clark of the Checke payeth to the Cofferers
Clarks for every moneths boord wagis fyve shillings and to the Common
servant monethly, as he Receaves yt-x8.

The Remooves of all such gent, or others as come not to the Court in the
moneth of remoove to give their Attendance is the Clarke of the Checkes ffee.

All dead Payes from the death of any Gent vntill the swearing of him
yt is to suckseed in the place, is of Ancient Costome due to the Clarke of the
Check, provided another be chosen before the end of the moneth after-
wards the dead pay goeth to the Kinge or as he shall please to dispose of
wch of late hath beene ymployed for Chappell bookes of Services and anthems

and prickinge of them.

265

HA»OLD N. HILLEBKAND

. <Fol. 44)

The Clarke of the Check is not to be chosen Steward of the Chappell
feast without his owne Consent.

The number of the gentlemen that receave vij ob per diem ffee is xxxj.

The Gospeller and the Serjeant receafle for ffee iiijd ob per diem, and the
epistler iijd per diem, The xij Children — xs per diem.

The Two yeomen and the Groome haue for boord wagis to each of yem
xd per diem.

The yeomen haue for ffee iijd a peece per diem, & the Groome — xls per
Annum.

The kynge doth geve in Rewarde at Newyears day to the Gent for their
newe years Guift — xiij11 vjs viijd from the Treasurer of the Chambr the ffee
their is vjs viijd and for the Children — vj11 xiijs iiijd — the ffee is iijs iiijd.

(Fol. 436)

1 January C11 viij8 ijd

2 ffebruary iiij xiij1* viij8 viijd I xx

3 March C" viij8 ijd ™U ™B ixd-

xx
0 Quarters ffee iiij xiiiju viij8 ixd

4 Aprill iiij xviij1* xxd

5 Maye Cu viij8 ijd xx

xx fiiJC iiij xij11 xiijd ob.

6 June iiij xviij1* xxd

0 Quarters ffee iiij xv11 ixs vijd

7 July Cu viij8 ijd

8 August Cu viij8 ijd

____ AA

9 Septembr iiij xviij" xxd ^ v

0 Quarters ffee iiij xvju x8 vjd

10 October C11 viij8 ijd

11 November iiij xviij11 xxd xx

12 December C" viij8 ijd f1^0 mJ xyh viiJS vJd

xx
0 Quarters ffee iiij xvj11 x8 vjd

Summa totaKs m vC Ixxj11 xj8 xd ob.

not being leape when it is leape yeare ad to ye month of f ebruary —

yeare xlvj8 vjd & to the Quarters wagis — xx8 xd ob.

EARLY HISTORY OF CHAPEL ROYAL

(Fol. 43)

A coppy of the peticion geven to ye kinge for pardon of our subsidies.

To the Kinges most excellent Matie The humble peticion of the subdeane,
Chaplaines Gent, and officers of your Maties Chappell Royall, and vestrie.

Most Gracious soveraigne.

Your Maties sayd poore servants by reason of their small allowance for
their dayly service havinge bene tyme out of mind pardoned their payment
of subsidies both by your gracious self, and Highnes noble progenitors doe
humbly beseach that the same Grace and favour may be still continued
vnto them, especially consideringe the hardnes of the tymes are growen to be
such that if the payment of subsidies graunted this parliament by the Clergie
and Temporalty be layd vpon them they cannot subsist to maintayne them
selves in their due attendance.

Wherefore they humbly beseach your sacred Matie to take their poore

estate in to your Gracious consideracton that they may be pardoned the

payment of all the sayd subsidies as airwaves heretofore they have beene

And they shall ever pray &c.
subscribed thus

At the Court at Hampton Court 12 January 1641. His Matie is Gra-
ciously pleased to graunt the peticioners this their humble suite, and that the
Clerk of ye signet attendinge prepare a Bill thereof accordingly fitt for his
Maties Royall signature.

Tho. Aylesbury
(Fol. 426)

The Kinges Maties Progress into Scotland 1633. in May.

A peticion was dd to his Matie for foure hundred pownds, for a shipp to
carry the gent, and their goods.

Three hundred pounds were graunted, wch they had by privy scale out of
the exchequer.

A shipp was graunted allso, and fifty three pownds add mony more
graunted by privy scale procured by mr secretary Cooke beinge one of the
Commissioners for the Admiralty after the commissioners appoynted for the
orderinge of the progress had considered yt.

The privye scale for this 5311 add mony was dd to Sr Sampson Dorrell
victuler for the Navie w0*1 he rec from the exchequer and the mony was dd
by him to Mr Sidenham the captaine of the shipp called the Dread nought,
where in the gent of the Chappell and officers of the vestry were wth the
stuff, and allso the children of the Chappell.

The SOO1* was distributed and disposed of.

The charges of procuringe of the privy seale and the fees of the exchequer
came vnto — 16U.
(Fol. 42)

There went into Scotland of the gent of the Chappell 19. they had 121*
a peece wch came vz hi toto to — 22811.

267

100 HAAOLD N. HILLEBRAND

There went of the children of ye chappell eight they had amongst them
dd to their mr a great part vz — 1211.

The seriaunt of the vestry had a great part vz — 12H.

One yeoman and the groome of the vestry then goinge had vju a peece
in toto— 12".

The 2 servants of the Chappell & vestry had 40s a peece vz — 41*.

The remainder of the 30011 was left remayninge in the Deane of the
Chappells hands wch was distributed amongst such gent of the Chappell as he
thought best deserved in that iourney. of wch the subdeane had v11 and divers
of the gent 20s a peece and I think the seriaunt of the vestry had 20s.

The Lo Chamberlaine then gave his warrant to the Mr of the Kinges
Barge for barges and lighters to carry the (fol. 416) gent and the rest wth
their stuff, copes, surplesses etc. from Whitehall to the shipp wch lay then at
Tillbury hope ( ?) neare Graves End.

HAROLD N. HILLEBRAND

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

SOME VERSIONS OF TIMON OF ATHENS ON THE STAGE

No Shakespearean play has a stage history more eccentric than
that of Timon of Athens. At least fifteen different English versions
of the play have been produced; German dramatists, from Schiller
to Bulthaupt, have been interested in variations upon the Timon
theme; and the influence of the play may be found in dramatic
literatures so varied as those of France, America, and Japan. Yet
real interest in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, as an acting play,
did not begin until the last quarter of the seventeenth century, long
after its appearance in the First Folio as a Shakespearean tragedy.
It was entered on November 8, 1623, upon the Stationer's Register
as one of the plays "not formerly entered to other men." No
positive evidence exists of its having been acted either before or
after this date until Thomas Shadwell's version of the play in 1678.
We are, however, inclined to accept Dr. Nicholson's "tolerably
decisive proof, m based upon the arrangement of the stage directions,
that the play was acted before 1623. That during the latter half
of the seventeenth century Timon was well known as the hero of a
legend and a play is certain. The Shakespeare Allusion Book says,
somewhat indefinitely, that "Sir William Davenant's company,
acted .... after 1671, .... Timon of Athens. "2 Robert Gould
refers to Timon in The Playhouse, A Satyr, 1685.3 J. Drake speaking
in 1699 of King Lear, Macbeth, and Timon of Athens says: "Twould
be impertinent to trouble the Reader with a minute examination
of Plays so generally known and approved. "4 ^ ,

Timon of Athens, or The Man-Hater, by Thomas Shadwell, was
acted at Dorset Garden in December, 1678. In the "Epistle Dedi-
catory," in which occurs Shadwell's famous declaration that Timon
of Athens was now "made into a play," the author deigns to pay

1 Transactions of the New Shakespeare Society (1874), p. 252, n. 2.

2 John Munro, The Shakespeare Allusion Book, II, 322. This version was an altera-
tion by Davenant and Shadwell.

s Ibid., II, 296.
* Ibid., II, 425-26.

101 [MODEEN PHILOLOGY, September, 1920

102 STANLEY T. WILLIAMS

tribute to Shakespeare: "I am now to present your Grace [the
Duke of Buckingham] with this History of Timon, which you were
pleased to tell me you liked, and it is the more worthy of you, since
it has the inimitable hand of Shakespeare in it, which never made
more masterly strokes than in this. "

This was the first version of the tragedy. J. Drake refers to it
in 1699 as one of "our best English Tragedies as our Hamlet, Mac-
beth .... Timon of Athens, "J and Charles Gildon, writing a year
earlier, says: "This play, as published first by our Author, was not
divided into Acts, but has been reviv'd with alterations, by Mr.
Shadwell, and for a few years past, as often acted at the Theatre
Royal, as any Tragedy I know."2 Perhaps ShadwelPs most striking
change was in giving Timon two mistresses. Genest's synopses
of the play show how wide were his deviations. Act I "begins with
a soliloquy by a new character called Demetrius" and "concludes
with a scene between Timon and Evandra, in which he professes a
regard for her on account of former favours, but says he is so much
in love with Melissa that he cannot live happily without her."3
In the second act we see Melissa with her maid Chloe, and in the
act following "Melissa having heard of Timon's distresses, orders
her servants not to admit him."4 But Timon finds that in his
reverses "Evandra consoles him."5 In the fourth act Melissa,
who has, meanwhile, sworn her love to Alcibiades, hears that Timon
has discovered gold. She searches him out, but he drives her away,
asserting his love for Evandra. The fifth act is totally changed.
After a scene between Timon and Evandra near the cave, Alcibiades
enters to find that Timon is dead and that Evandra has stabbed
herself. Melissa then strives to restore herself in the graces of
Alcibiades, but is repulsed. The Senators, with halters about their
necks, are harangued by Alcibiades. The play ends as all lament
the deaths of Timon and Evandra. In this version Thomas Betterton
played Timon.

1 The Shakespeare Allusion Book, II, 425-26.

2 Ibid., II, 421.

8 Some Account of the English Stage, I, 248-49.
4 Ibid., I, 249.
•' Ibid.

270

SOME VERSIONS OF "TIMON OF ATHENS" 103

The epilogue of The Jew of Venice1 by George Granville, Lord
Lansdowne, implies that the play was unsuccessful, but Downes
in Roscius Anglicanus praises it: "Timon of Athens, alter'd by
Mr. Shadwell; 'twas very well acted, and the music in't well per-
formed; it wonderfully pleased the Court and City; being an
excellent moral."2 And, in fact, the stage history of this version
leaves no doubt as to its success. As Genest says, it was "continued
on the acting list for many years."3 The first revival occurred
at the Haymarket Theater on June 27, 1707.4 Mills played Timon,
Verbruggen Apemantus, and Booth Alcibiades. The parts of
Evandra and Melissa were played, respectively, by Mrs. Porter
and Mrs. Bradshaw. On December 8, 1720,5 the play was put on
at Drury Lane with Booth as Timon and Mills as Apemantus, and
on May 1, 1733,6 it was acted at Covent Garden with Milward as
Timon and Quin as Apemantus. Walker played Alcibiades. Drury
Lane offered the play again on March 20, 1740,7 for the benefit of
Milward, who again played Timon. Finally, it was seen five years
later at Covent Garden, on April 20, 1745,8 with Hale presumably
in the title role.9

The next version of Timon of Athens proved to be a composite
of both Shadwell and Shakespeare, arranged by James Love (James
Dance) and published in 1768. It was acted at Richmond, and,
according to Biographia Dramatica, "well received."10 Aikin
played Timon and Love himself Apemantus. Alcibiades was
acted by Cautherly. In the first act one of Shadwell's songs was
sung. Shadwell's Melissa was omitted but was frequently men-
tioned. In the second act the dunning scene was omitted, and
the act ended with the first two scenes of Shakespeare's third act.
In the fourth act Evandra spoke lines usually pronounced by Flavius

* The lines run: "How was the Scene forlorn, and how despis'd,
When Timon without Musick moraliz'd."

2 Roscius Anglicanus, or. An Historical Review of the Stage (1789), p. 47.

3 Some Account of the English Stage, I, 251.

« Ibid., II, 373. • Ibid., Ill, 394. « ibid., IV, 164.

« Ibid., Ill, 46. 1 Ibid., Ill, 609.

» On February 6, 1711, a version of Timon of Athens was acted at the Charity School,
Clerkenwell, under the direction of John Honeycott, the headmaster. For this offense
Honeycott was publicly rebuked by the Society for the Promoting of Christian Knowl-
edge. See Notes and Queries (7th Series), III, 46.

w IV, 339.

271

104 STANLEY T. WILLIAMS

in the last act (V, i, 119-22; 129-133; 216). This act began with
a soliloquy by Timon based on an earlier scene between him and
Apemantus (IV, iii, 197-397).

Richard Cumberland, leader of the school of Sentimental Drama,
offered on December 4, 1771, at Drury Lane Theater, a typically
eighteenth-century version of Timon of Athens. This adaptation
has been fully discussed elsewhere.1 It is suggestive to recall the
comment of Horace Walpole that Cumberland had " caught the
manners and diction of the original so exactly" that it was "full
as bad a play as it was before he corrected it. "2 The extraordinary
changes in Cumberland's version include: the complete mutilation
of the banquet scene; the omission of Apemantus' part; and the
creation of a daughter with whom Alcibiades falls in love. In the
second act Lucius makes love to Evanthe, the daughter of Timon,
but is interrupted by Lucullus. This act is appreciably shortened.
In the fourth act no courtezans nor banditti appear — concessions
to the polite taste of the age! In the last act still more radical
changes occur: Evanthe intercedes for the citizens; the treasure
found in the woods by Timon proves to have been deposited there
by Lucullus; Alcibiades' soldiers pillage Lucius' house, etc. Indeed,
as Doran points out, Timon has "more of Cumberland and less of
Shakespeare than the public could welcome."3

Still another adaptation of Timon of Athens was produced at
Covent Garden Theater on May 13, 1786, by Thomas Hull. Holman
played Timon, Wroughton Apemantus, and Farren Alcibiades.
Hull acted the part of Flavius and Quick that of Lucullus. "Quick
and Wewitza (Lucius) played well," says Genest, "and did not
make their parts too comic."4 The European Magazine for May,
1786, approves the interpretation of Evandra, but adds: "We
cannot say the same of Mr. Hull's alteration, which ought to be
consigned to oblivion. "

With the close of the age of alterations Timon of Athens began
to come into its own. Through the aid of elaborate scenic devices

1 See S. T. Williams, Richard Cumberland (1917), pp. 88-91.

2 Ibid., p. 88.

» History of the Stage, II, 68.

4 Some Account of the English Stage, VI, 402.

272

SOME VERSIONS OF " TIMON OF ATHENS" 105

the original play achieved some success upon the stage. The first
of these revivals of Shakespeare's play took place at Drury Lane on
October 28, 1816. Genest quotes the advertisement of Lamb, the
adapter: "The Hon. George Lamb, in the advertisement prefixed
to the play acted on this evening says — 'the present attempt has
been to restore Shakespeare on the stage, with no other omissions
than such as the refinement of manners has rendered necessary — the
short interpolation in the last scene has been chiefly compiled from
Cumberland's alteration.' Lamb alludes chiefly to the characters
of the courtezans — but much is omitted in the dialogue, and generally
with propriety."1 The main changes of Lamb were textual; the
play as a whole adhered to the original.

But the fame and distinction of this version of Timon of Athens
was due, above all else, to the fact that Edmund Kean played the
part of Timon. In a long review of the play the European Magazine
for November, 1816, points out how exactly Kean was suited to the
role. Likewise the New Monthly Magazine for December, 1816,
praises this memorable performance :

October 28th the Tragedy of Timon of Athens was performed after a
long absence from the stage. Whoever has read this piece will coincide in
the opinion attributed to the late Mr. Sheridan, that it is calculated for the
closet only, and cannot produce a great effect in representation. Mr. Kean
of course personated the principal character, upon which the whole interest
of the play depends. It is certainly one of those parts in which his pecu-
liarity of manner, his rapid transition of countenance, and the harshness of
his voice, are employed to great advantage; but such is the nature of the
piece, that till the conclusion of the third act he had very little opportunity
of distinguishing himself. Here his energy, however, compensated, in a
great measure, for the flatness of the preceding scenes. When he called on
his persecutors to "cut out his heart in sums" to "tell out his blood" in the
liquidation of their demands, his eyes flashed fire, his frame seemed con-
vulsed with passion, and his utterance choked with the violence of his rage.
His parting exclamation, "Here, tear me, take me, and the gods fall on you! "
was accompanied with the hurried action and horrible tone of fury and
despair. In the succeeding scene the determination of Timon to invite his
flatterers to a banquet, as deceitful as their promises, was finely rendered.
The momentary pause before the idea was matured, the rapidity with which
he directed his steward to write his friends once more, and the exultation

1 Ibid., VIII, 584. For an account of Lamb's version on the German stage see
Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare Gesellschaft, XXXVIII, 224.

273

106 STANLEY T. WILLIAMS

with which, in the anticipation of their disappointment, he exclaimed,
"I'll once more feast the rascals," produced an electrical effect upon the
audience. We did not think him equally happy in the delivery of the grace
in the mock-banquet scene, but the imprecations which follow were given
with terrifying force. In the three last scenes with Alcibiades, Apemantus
and the Senators, which, though differing in words are nearly similar in
effect, Kean acquitted himself admirably. Bengough's personation of
Apemantus was far above mediocrity. Wallack as Alcibiades, and Holland
as Flavius, were very successful. The tragedy has been got up in splendid
style; the banquet scene in particular is superb, and the incidental music
by Cooke, deserved the warm commendation which it received. These
advantages, combined with Kean's extraordinary powers, procured for
the piece a most favourable reception and frequent repetition.

No better proof exists that Timon possesses a certain unique
power upon the stage than these testimonies concerning Kean's
greatness in the role. B. W. Procter, in his Life of Edmund Kean,
says that "Kean, as was to be expected, gave all the dialogue in the
latter part of the play with prodigious effect: his retorts upon
Apemantus, and his curses upon ungrateful Athens .... were
made as fierce as voice and expression could render them. "x Oulton,
also, in his History of the Theater, praises this production.2 But
the two most vivid records of Kean as Timon are found in F. W.
Hawkins' Life of Edmund Kean? The second description is from
the pen of Leigh Hunt:

The sustained force of his Shylock, and the caustic vigour of his Richard
might have been accepted as a reliable presage of the excellence with which
he embodied the Timon of Shakespeare. His acting throughout was deep
in feeling, intense, varied, and powerful. The earlier dialogues passed
off with a degree of languor from which the finest acting could not redeem
them; but as the play advanced, admiration of Kean's talent excited a
deep solicitude; and the energy with which he gave the execrations of
Timon, the intense thought which he infused into every word of his parting
address to Athens, his altercation with the rugged and philosophical Ape-
mantus, and his encouragement of the thieves in their warfare upon mankind,
were unexceptionably admirable. His burst of impatience, "Give me
breath," and the manner in which he reprobated the guests at the empty
feast, were electrical; and nothing could have been more beautiful, or in
closer conformity with the spirit of the part, than the grim and savage fury
which possessed him throughout his different encounters with those who
disturbed his solitude in the woods. Mr. Harry Stoe Van Dyk writes in an

1 P. 179. 2 i, 345. 8 i, 396-99.

274

SOME VERSIONS OF "TIMON OF ATHENS " 107

unpublished letter that Kean breathed the very soul of melancholy and
tenderness in those impressive words:

"But myself, who had the world as my confectionary;
The mouths, the tongues, the eyes and hearts of men
At duty, more than I could frame employment;
That numberless upon me stuck, as leaves
Do on the oak, have, with one winter's brush,
Fell from their boughs and left me open, bare
For every storm that blows" (IV, iii, 259-66).

"The finest scene in the whole performance," writes Leigh Hunt, "was
the one with Alcibiades. We never remember the force of contrast to have
been more truly pathetic. Timon, digging in the woods with his spade,
hears the approach of military music; he starts, waits its approach silently,
and at last in comes the gallant Alcibiades with a train of splendid soldiery.
Never was scene more effectively managed. First you heard a sprightly
quick march playing in the distance. Kean started, listened, and leaned in a
fixed and angry manner on his spade, with frowning eyes and lips full of
the truest feeling, compressed but not too much so; he seemed as if resolved
not to be deceived, even by the charm of a thing inanimate; — the audience
were silent; the march threw forth its gallant notes nearer and nearer, the
Athenian standards appear, then the soldiers come treading on the scene
with that air of confident progress which is produced by the accompaniment
of music; and at last, while the squalid misanthrope still maintains his
posture and keeps his back to the strangers, in steps the young and victorious
Alcibiades, in the flush of victorious expectation. It is the encounter of
hope and despair. "

Such comment concerning an almost forgotten stage history is
especially valuable since the play has been generally neglected by
the ordinary theatrical criticism of the day. Francis Gentleman,
in The Dramatic Censor,1 does not devote space to Timon, and,
most unluckily, Hazlitt's famous body of Shakespearean criticism
contributes nothing to the stage history of the tragedy. In 1840
Macready examined the play, with a view to producing it, but
contented himself with writing in his Diary that it was "only an
incident with comments on it. "2 In 1851 Samuel Phelps brought it
forward, magnificently staged: "On the 15th September [Phelps]
produced with great splendour Shakespeare's Timon of Athens,
and again made a tremendous effect on play-goers generally in the
character of Timon. Old habitues and the critics who remembered

1 Francis Gentleman, The Dramatic Censor (1770).

2 The Diaries of William Charles Macready, II (1833-51), 65.

275

108 STANLEY T. WILLIAMS

Edmund Kean in this character all said Phelps surpassed him."1
Phelps had a strong supporting company: George Bennett's Ape-
mantus was a worthy companion portrait; Marston this time
played Alcibiades (on its next production Apemantus) and the
whole strength of the fine working company was engaged in the
piece. Timon was played some forty nights between the first
production and Christmas.2

A few newspaper criticisms of the performance are quoted in the
Life of Samuel Phelps.1 Details of this production especially noted
were the "Greek interiors," the "classical landscapes," and the
final scene at the tomb of Timon. Of the oratory, in particular,
"the curse at the end of the third act .... brought down the
curtain with a tumult of applause." Mr. Marston's Apemantus
was of the greatest service to the effectiveness of the scene: " With
a countenance deformed by malignity, and abject deportment, a
sharp spiteful glance, and a hard-hitting delivery of the pointed
language, this personage was a most admirable type of the worst
species of the cynic breed."4

Phelps revived his production at Sadler's Wells on October 11,
1856, with new "rich garments and costly materials," and "the
scenery being new painted."5 Marston played Apemantus, Rae
Flavius, and Rayner Alcibiades. A review of the piece appeared
in the Morning Advertiser: The "scenery," says the critic, is "not
only archaeologically correct, but picturesquely beautiful; and the
diorama that shows the attack on Athens by Alcibiades, and the

march of his army, is a masterpiece of effect and contrivance

The applause burst out in spontaneous volleys. "6

Reference has been found (The Athenaeum, May 28, 1904) to a
performance of Timon of Athens, under the direction of Charles
Calvert, the actor-manager, at Manchester, about 1864. But
apparently no official record of such a performance has survived.

1 W. M. Phelps and J. Forbes-Robertson, Life of Samuel Phelps, p. 121.

2 Ibid.

» Ibid., pp. 222-24.

4 Ibid., p. 222. "As Apemantus in 'Timon of Athens' Henry Marston gave the
biting retorts of the misanthropic philosopher with unforced point and excellent effect"
(John Westland Marston, Our Recent Actors, II, 53-54).

6 W. M. Phelps and J. Forbes-Robertson, Life of Samuel Phelps, p. 152.

« Ibid., p. 152. Professor Morley in The Diary of a London Playgoer, p. 154, says
that "Timon of Athens is wholly a poem to the Sadler's Wells audience."

276

SOME VERSIONS OF "TIMON OF ATHENS" 109

The next acting of the play which has left us a definite history is
that sponsored by F. R. Benson, the actor-manager, at the Shake-
speare Festival at Stratford-on-Avon, in 1892. Shakespearean
revivals began on Monday, April 18, and concluded with three
performances of Timon of Athens, one on Friday, April 22, and two
on the poet's birthday. The Academy of April 16, 1892, has the
following notice:

The annual series of memorial performances at Stratford-on-Avon,
which have again this year, for the fifth time, been undertaken by Mr. F. R.
Benson, will consist of eight representations of Shakespeare's plays, includ-
ing a revival of "Timon of Athens" a tragedy that has not been seen on
the boards since Phelps produced it at Sadler's Wells about twenty-five
years ago.

The version was compressed into three acts, and Benson himself
played the part of Timon. The following account of an eye witness
is of interest :

Mr. Mollison gave a good Apemantus, and Mr. Swete a respectable, but
heavy, and rather too melting Flavius. But there is really only one "part"
in "Timon of Athens" and that was played by Mr. Benson and played well.
The change from the graceful and gracious lord to the bitter and broken
misanthrope was skilfully worked out. The five acts were thrown into
three, to hasten the action, and the scenery was pretty if not always true to
reality. The music was necessarily incongruous. But though giving much
credit to Mr. Benson for his representation, we became more than ever
convinced that this one man play, without lovers and love scenes, without
plot or counterplot, would never be a popular one for the public and mer-
cenary stage. We are glad to have seen it, for we think we learn something
more of Shakespeare's mind and art in every representation of his works;
but it leaves us sad. Lord Timon's "feast" made a picturesque and classic
picture, and the "masque of ladies" was only too congruous with modern
taste. The mock feast was less studied; and the long and dragging scene
in the woods where visitor after visitor arrive and depart, became rather
monotonous. The termination was varied at each representation. On
Friday Timon was found dead by his friends and the speechifying was at
his side. On Saturday, the reading of his gravestone was among his friends
in another scene; and the death scene was only a momentary tableau, a
finer effect, a solitary ending to the solitary man.1

i Poet Lore, IV, 374-75. In a recent letter to the present writer (June 8, 1919)
Mr. Benson says of this production: "The points we laid stress on were: Banquets,
dancing girls, flutes, wine, colour, and form. Then comes the contrast of the sour misery,
the embittered wisdom, the impotent rage against the false gods and the end of the

man who yearned for truth and wisdom and love I love the play and the part.

I take it that it is somewhat of a preliminary study for Lear, approached from a different
angle."

277

110 ST/NLEY T. WILLIAMS

Timon was acted again in London on May 18, 1904, at the Court
Theater. The London Times of May 19 notes that the play achieved
a run of some ten nights: "Last night Mr. J. H. Leigh added Timon
of Athens to his choice little record of Shakespearean revivals. This
rather quaint play, which has not been seen in London since
Phelps produced it at Sadler's Wells half a century ago, is acted
with zeal and intelligence by every member of the Court company.
There is of course no 'female interest7 in the play, and even the
ladies Timandra and Phrynia, ' mistresses to Alcibiades, ' have been
on this occasion virtually reduced to dumb-show; but there is a
lovely ballet, and a Cupid who might have strayed out of Offenbach's
Belle Helene. Altogether it is what Jim Pinkerton would call an
'olio of attractions.'" The Athenaeum of May 28, 1904, states
that this adaptation was based upon Benson's version of 1892.

The Timon story had currency also in Germany. Beginning
in 17781 adaptations of Shakespeare's tragedy began to appear.
Many of these were so free as to retain few traces of the original,
but one or two adhere scrupulously to Shakespeare. Many of these
versions have survived, and all of them are interesting examples
of the remarkable stage history of the play.

Study of such important dramatic histories as Cohn's Shake-
speare in Germany or Creizenach's Englische Comodianten fails to
show that the English players acted Timon in Germany. Never-
theless, the revival of interest in Timon as a dramatic theme occurred
before the English Shadwell's renaissance of the play, for in 1671,
at Thorn, was brought out Timon} oder der Missbrauch des Reich-
turns.2 This play, however, is rather a version of Lucian's Dialogue
than of Shakespeare's play. Apparently the earliest known version
of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens adapted for the German stage
appeared about a century later, offered by the K. K. Censur-Actuarius,
F. J. Fischer. Genee notes: "1778. Timon von Athen, ein Schau-
spiel in drey en Aufztigen. (Schauspiel von Shakespeare. Furs
Prager Theater adaptirt von F. J. Fischer.) Prag 1778. "3 Fischer
curtailed the play, blending the second and third acts into one and

1 Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare Gesellschaft, XXXI, 86.

2 Ibid., XXXI, 86, note.
'I6id.,XXXI, 86.

278

SOME VERSIONS OF "TIMON OF ATHENS" 111

eliminating other passages until only three acts remained. So far as
known this version was never acted.

The interest shown in reviving Shakespeare by such men as
Schroeder of Hamburg and Dalberg of Mannheim1 made it inevitable
that Timon of Athens should receive attention as an acting play.
Thus we find that Schiller himself is concerned about its production.
In connection with his study of the stage he writes: "Unsere Schau-
biihne hat noch eine grosse Eroberung ausstehen, von deren Wich-
tigkeit erst der Erfolg sprechen wird. Shakespeare's 'Timon von
Athen ' ist, soweit ich mich besinnen kann, noch auf keiner deutschen
Btihne erschienen; und so gewiss ich den Menschen vor allem
Andern zuerst in Shakespeare aufsuche, so gewiss weiss ich im
ganzen Shakespeare kein Stuck, wo er wahrhafter vor mir stande,
wo er lauter und beredter zu meinem Herzen sprache, wo ich mehr
Lebenswahrheit lernte als im 'Timon von Athen.' Es ist wahres
Verdienst um die Kunst, dieser Goldader nachzugraben. "2 More
than this, Schiller, in a letter to Dalberg of August 24, 1784, expressed
the intention, never fulfilled, of himself adapting Timon?

Dalberg, the famous stage manager, had the honor of first
producing Shakespeare's play in Germany, or at least a version of
it on the stage. Timon of Athens , adapted by Dalberg, was acted at
Mannheim on March 22, 1789. This adaptation was far from being
conservative: Timon is the lover of Timandra and the murderer
of Sempronius — changes hardly acceptable, I believe, to those
interested today in the problem of Timon of Athens. Nevertheless,
these changes accomplish one result, namely the motivation of
Alcibiades' speech before the Senate! The play was a lawless
version of Shakespeare, was badly produced, and was acted only
twice. But this failure pointed the way to other and better pro-
ductions of Timon.4'

In all probability the next version of Timon of Athens acted on
the German stage was that of Albert Lindner, which appeared at

1 Ibid., XXV, 25-36.

2 Ibid., XXXI, 85.

» Ibid., XXV, 25, and XXI, 86.

4 The part of Timon was played by Bock; the r61es of Flavius, Apemantus, and
Alcibiades were acted respectively by Beil, Iffland, and Beck. See Jahrbuch der deutschen
Shakespeare Gesellschaft, XXXI, 89.

279

112 STANLEY T. WILLIAMS

Berlin on April 29, 1871. l The manuscript reads: "Timon von
Athen. Trauerspiel in 5 Akten von Wilkins und Shakespeare.
Fur die neuere Blihne iibersetzt und in 4 Akten bearbeitet von Dr.
Albert Lindner. "2 The original was daringly altered by this adapter.
New characters are introduced, notably the Senators, Antiphon,
Periander, Thrasyllus, and Agathon, and Timon's servants Cleon,
Lichas, and Nessus. The courtezans are dispensed with; instead
the reader is entertained with the loves of Alcibiades and Aspasia.
There are many changes in phraseology and incident: the fool is
no more; songs are introduced; and the banquet scene is expanded.

Interest in Timon of Athens had evidently been aroused, but it is
only necessary to compare its record with that of other Shake-
spearean plays in Germany to discover its failure to secure a definite
hold upon the stage. Between 1876 and 1892 the Merchant of Venice
was performed approximately one thousand times; during this
period Timon of Athens was, apparently, not acted a single night.3
The next appearance of the tragedy was on November 12, 1892,
at the Hof-und-National Theater in Munich,4 when it was adapted
for the stage by Heinrich Bulthaupt. This play is the freest of all
the free versions of Timon. The dramatis personae are almost
unrecognizable. The play begins with a scene between the house-
keeper, Lesbia, and Timon's daughter, Klytia, and includes episodes
between Klytia and her husband Glaukon, Alcibiades and an Athen-
ian named Klinias, Alcibiades and the daughter of Timon. Timon
is thus provided by Bulthaupt with both a daughter and a son-in-law.

1 Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare Gesellschaft, XXXI, 89. A free adaptation of
Timon of Athens, in a collection of Shakespeare's tragedies, made by Meyer, may have
been acted about 1825, but it is unlikely that such was the case. Another stage arrange-
ment of the play was made by Feodor Wehl, the editor of Die Deutsche Schaubilhne,
in 1862. This alteration followed the original with consistency except for the deletion
of the Senate scene. In its place is substituted, at the beginning of the fourth act,
another scene designed to motivate more effectively the relations between Timon and
Alcibiades. It is possible that this version was never acted, but the following notice
seems to indicate its appearance on the stage: "1863 Leipzig .... nach der Schlegel
Tieck'schen Uebers. bearb. von P. Wehl." See Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare
Gesellschaft, XXV, 25, note, and XXXI, 103. Timon was apparently played by Hanisch.
It is probable that a version written by August Fresenius was neither acted nor printed.
See ibid., XXXI, 82 ff.

2 Ibid., XXXI, 89. For a complete account of the theory of Wilkins' share in the
composition of Timon of Athens see the article by Delius, Jahrbuch der deutschen Shake-
speare Gesellschaft, II, 335-61.

s Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare Gesellschaft; see Statistischer Ueberblick, in
XII-XXVIII.

* Ibid., XXXI, 106.

280

SOME VERSIONS OF "TIMON OF ATHENS" 113

Ventidius is replaced by a character called Menander. More
significant changes are the greater emphasis placed upon the Alci-
biades theme, the compression of Shakespeare's second and third
acts into one, and the development of the banquet scene. After
Timon's ruin Glaukon remains alone with Timon. The latter
laments that the bridegroom must take Klytia dowerless. But
this Glaukon does not intend to do; he renounces the marriage.
In the ensuing quarrel Klytia enters, and weeps at the feet of her
disloyal lover. Glaukon persists in his refusal, is struck down by a
golden candlestick in the hand of Timon, and dies in the arms of
Klytia! It is difficult to conceive of a more ironical travesty upon
the ancient and venerable story of Lucian and Shakespeare.

Nevertheless, the public preferred Timon, the murderer, to
Timon, the misanthrope. Bulthaupt's play enjoyed a success
unknown to earlier versions. The critics were dubious, but Fre-
senius says that he himself heard the audience call repeatedly for
the author.1 Its popularity as an acting play in the nineties is
attested by the following somewhat incomplete list of performances
throughout Germany: 1894, twenty performances on six different
stages (Berlin, four; Bremen, four; Cassel, three; Dusseldorf,
three; Oldenburg, three; Schwerin, three); 1895, six performances
on three different stages (Braunschweig, two; Breslau, two; Stutt-
gart, two); 1896, seven performances on four different stages
(Braunschweig, one; Liibeck, three; Prag, two; Stuttgart, one.)2

It is easy to suggest the similarity of attitude of English and
German dramatists toward Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. It
offered, obviously, material for the scissors and the amending pen.
The English interest in the experimentation focused in the seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries, the German in the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. And in both countries, when revision
was most absurd, occurred the inevitable reaction to the noble
original. In England there appeared Kean's and Phelps's nineteenth-
century productions, and in Germany the production at Munich,

i Ibid., XXXI. 116. See also ibid., XXIX, 110-47.

2/ftid., XXXI, 433-38. The freedom of Bulthaupt's version is evidenced in the
following notice of the performance of the play: " Timon von Athen, mit freier Benutzung
der Shakespeare zugeschriebenen Dichtung von Heinrich Bulthaupt" (ibid., XLIX,
122-36, and XLV, 138). Two performances of Timon of Athens, presumably of this
version, occurred at Zurich in 1899 (ibid., XXXVI, 347).

281

114 STAITLEY T. WILLIAMS

September 19, 1910, in the new Shakespeare theater. In Germany,
after Bulthaupt's presentation of Timon as a domestic thug, it
became clear that the many variations of the Timon story led
nowhere. Fresenius says: "Das Original tiberragt sie alle bei
weitem. Es dtirfte sich deshalb schon der Muhe verlohnen, der
ursprtinglichen Dichtung, nur mit allernotwendigsten Kiirzungen
und Anderungen, noch ein weiteres Mai auf die Buhne zu verhelfen.
Man wage den Versuch."1 And Frenzel, thinking of Lindner's
version, says: "Wozu iiberhaupt diese Bearbeitungen ? Mit einem
Strich durch die Reden Timons wider Timandra und Phrynia kann
man ohne den geringsten Anstoss das Stuck uberall darstellen. "2
The revival at Munich followed the original as much as possible
in a version of three acts given without interruptions. The basis
of the text was Paul Heyse's translation.3 As in Phelps's revivals,
the stage settings were elaborate and were founded upon a careful
study of the text. The last act of the tragedy, for example, was
pronounced against a background of Greek landscape, with glimpses
in the distance of the city crowned by the Acropolis.

England, the country of Shakespeare's birth, and Germany,
the country which professes to have discovered him, naturally
witnessed more performances of Timon of Athens than other lands.
But, comparatively obscure as the play is, it has influenced other
dramatic literatures. For many years Shakespeare's footing upon
the French stage was insecure. Evidently the more accepted plays
had first place; nevertheless, versions of Timon, or plays distinctly
affected by the Timon story were acted. Brecourt's Timon, per-
formed first August 13, 1684, was based upon Lucian, and probably
owed nothing to Shakespeare.4 F. W. Hawkins, in his Annals of
the French Stage speaks of the piece as an " undramatic dramatization
of Lucian's dialogue," but says that it "was represented seventeen
times."5 In all probability Brecourt's other play upon this subject,
Les Flatteurs trompes ou I'ennemi des faux amis, is connected in no

1 Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare Qesellschaft, XXXI, 82-135, and XLIX, 127.

2 Hid., XLIX, 127.

3 Ibid., XXXI, 122.

1 Dictionnaire Dramatique, III, 276. See also Anecdotes Dramatiques, II, 226-27,
and Dictionnaire des Theatres de Paris, V (1756), 465.
8 Ibid., 11,155.

SOME VERSIONS OF "TIMON OF ATHENS" 115

way with the English dramatist. Both plays, however, attest
French recognition of Timon as a dramatic subject, as does another
version of the story which appeared some years later: "Timon le
Misanthrope, comedie en trois actes, en prose, avec des divertisse-
ments, par Delisle, aux Italiens, 1722."1 The original theme was
much embellished by Delisle.

Certainly by the last half of the eighteenth century Shakespeare's
Timon of Athens must have become familiar to French students of
the drama, for between 1746 and 1749 Pierre de la Place translated
the play,2 while Pierre Letourneur's rendering was made between
1776 and 1782.3 "Petitot thought," says Jusserand in Shakespeare
in France, "(but wrongly) that he had discovered an imitation of
Timon in Le Dissapateur by Destouches. "4 The first French play
strongly influenced by Shakespeare's Timon of Athens seems to have
been that written by Louis-Sebastian Mercier, another translator
of Shakespeare, during the Revolution, in 1794: " Timon d'Athenes,
en cinq actes et en prose, imitation de Shakespeare, Paris 'an iii.'"5
In this version Timon usurps a unique function. He becomes a
mouthpiece for the political unrest of the age. The Preface includes
a diatribe against Robespierre, and all of Timon's misanthropy has
a political twist. The author's purpose is made clear in the Preface :
"Timon d'Athenes etait surnomm6 le haisseur des hommes. Ah!
si quelqu'un avait le droit affreux de les hai'r, ce serait peut-etre
celui qui aurait vecu en France depuis dix-huit mois, au milieu de
tant de scenes de demence at de fureurs. L'histoire en est si effroy-
able que si 1'on ne se hate d'en rassembler les temoignages, on la
prendra dans deux ans pour un roman calomnieux de la nature
humaine. Des hommes de sang et de tenebres au nom de la Repub-
lique une et indivisible ont metamorphose* la sainte colere d'un grand
peuple en veritable canabalisme, ont corrumpu tout a la fois, la
politique, les lois, la langue et la morale."6 In the banquet scene

1 Dictionnaire des Theatres de Paris, V, 465-66.

2 Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare Gesellschaft, XXXVIII, 111-17.
» Ibid.

* Pp. 238-39, note.

5 Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare Gesellschaft, XXXVIII, 111. See also J. J.
Jusserand, Shakespeare in France, p. 439, note.

• Preface, p. ii. See also Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare Gesellschaft, XXXVIII,
113.

116 STAI*LEY T. WILLIAMS

and in the last interview with the Senators before his cave Timon 's
anathemas against Athens are really directed against France. In
the latter scene he cries out :

Oui, je suis malade de dugout, du degout de ce monde d'ou vous avez
banni le re"gne de la justice, des moeurs et des lois .... Vos lois poli-
tiques, vos lois civiles, toutes ne sont elles pas cruelles? .... Eh! que
ne feront point le crime insolent et Paudace effrene*e, lorsqu'ils seront
assures dePimpunite' ? Dieux! dans ces e"pouvantables jours, donnez du
moins une marque de votre puissance; rhomme n'est plus fait a votre
image.1

This is not Timon speaking, but rather Mercier fresh from the
scenes of the Revolution.

In form Mercier's play is very like Shakespeare's. It is short-
ened, but the leading characters are retained, though some names
are changed, notably Lucides for Lucius, Semphronide for Sem-
pronius, and Lucullime for Lucullus. The painter is called Pic-
tomane, and the poet Spondeas. The play was very probably acted,
though I have found no positive record of performance.

One is inclined to suspect that Moliere's famous misanthrope
was influenced by Shakespeare's play, especially when one finds
such a device as Coquelin has pointed out as occurring in both,
namely the repast of hot water, an incident which also occurs in
UAuvergnat of Labille. Certainly the influence, though not clearly
traced, has persisted, for a dramatic historian's account of La Cigue,
acted at the Ode*on on May 20, 1844, describes this piece as a spirited
comedy "qui rapelle pour le fond, le Timon d'Athenes de Shake-
speare, et pour la forme, la maniere grecque d' Andre Chenier. "2

It is almost unthinkable, so widely has Shakespeare been trans-
lated, read, and acted, that Timon of Athens, in some form, has not
been performed in practically all European countries. There have
been, for example, adaptations of the play in the United States
and in Japan. Timon of Athens, arranged for the stage by N. H.
Bannister, was first acted in New York at the little boxlike Franklin
Theater on April 8, 1839.3 An American revival of the play of con-

1 Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare Gesellschaft, XXXVIII, 113.

2 Paul Porel et Georges Monval, L'Odeon, II (1882), 232.

3 T. A. Browne, A History of the New York Stage, I, 260. Richard Mansfield con-
sidered seriously bringing forward a production of Timon of Athens "In the search for
new characters the Shakespearean gallery was continually under scrutiny. Timon of
Athens, Palstafl, and Bong John were often on the verge of production." Cf. Paul
Wilstach, Richard Mansfield, p. 417.

284

SOME VERSIONS OF "TIMON OF ATHENS"

117

siderable importance was that of Mr. Frederick Warde, when on
tour in 1910.1 The version was free, the most notable change being
that of the final episode. The play ends with a procession of soldiers
and citizenry following Timon's body as it is borne along in lamenta-
tion. The piece was elaborately staged, and there was introduced
a pantomime, called The Senses, together with a Greek dance. This
version of Timon of Athens was acted more than a dozen times in
various American cities of the South and West, and it achieved
appreciable success.

The Japanese play founded upon Shakespeare's Timon was
acted about 1914. The adaptation was made by Koshu Kojima
for the Shintomiza Theater of Tokio. Romeo and Juliet, known in
Japan as the Riddle of the Heart Threads Solved, and The Merchant of
Venice, entitled Law-Suit with Human Flesh as a Pledge, had been
popular plays. Similarly Timon of Athens, called The Sound of the
Bell, was successful. The tragedy has many additions and changes,
but various incidents such as the scene in the garden of the Viscount
Hozumi, the Japanese Timon, with his flattering friends, show
clearly the influence of Shakespeare.2

STANLEY T. WILLIAMS

YALE UNIVERSITY

1 Accounts of Mr. Warde's performances of Timon of Athens are accessible in records
of the stage and prompt-books, now in the possession of Mr. Warde. Mr. Warde informed
the present writer that he once acted the part of Flaminius in an English production of
Timon at Manchester. He says that Richard Mansfield told him that Timon of Athena
was "worthless for stage presentation."

2 The Nation, CIII, 90 (July 27, 1916).

285

REVIEWS AND NOTICES

A Register of Middle English Didactic and Religious Verse. BY
CARLETON BROWN, Professor of English in the University of
Minnesota. Part II: Index of First Lines and Index of Sub-
jects and Titles. Oxford. Printed for the Bibliographical
Society at the University Press, 1920. Quarto. Pp. xx+458.

Much earlier than might have been expected in these troublous years
Professor Brown has given us the second and final volume of his Register of
Middle English Verse. Of the usefulness of these volumes to the investiga-
tor of the literature, the religious thought, or the social ideals of England in
the Middle Ages it is impossible to speak too highly. No worker who has
ever examined them will willingly be without a copy. Professor Brown has
by his indefatigable industry and his almost inhuman accuracy and range of
knowledge added days to our lives. Additions and corrections will of course
be made to his work from time to time, but the additions will be few and the
corrections fewer, and the fine paper and ample margins of the volumes
will enable their fortunate owners to record all the additions and corrections
that are likely ever to be made.

In the Afterword of the present volume Professor Brown devotes a few
pages to a discussion of the comparative popularity of Middle English reli-
gious and secular poems, as indicated by the number of manuscripts of each.
He points out that the judgments of our own day are not trustworthy criteria
of the popularity or importance of a literary production in its own day and
that the most trustworthy evidence upon these points is the circulation it
enjoyed, as indicated by the number of extant or known copies of it.

This is a fact of no little importance, and Professor Brown has done
well to emphasize it as he has. It has been argued, for example, that after
writing his translation

of the Wrecched Engendryng of Mankinde
As men may in Pope Innocent yfynde,

Chaucer destroyed it because of its unattractive subject-matter. Whatever
may have been the fate of Chaucer's translation, it cannot safely be argued
that the subject would not have appealed to him or to his contemporaries.
Many manuscripts of the original treatise have come down to us; it was
translated into French by Eustache Deschamps; was frequently reprinted
by the early printers; and two translations of it into English were published
in 1576 — one by George Gascoigne, the other (republished in 1580 and
1586) by H. Kerton.
287] 119

120 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

Discussion of Chaucer's attitude toward his "Tale of Melibeus" ought
also to take into consideration the vogue of Albertano's treatise in the
Middle Ages. The truth is that the success of a book — like that of a jest —
lies, not in its absolute quality, but in its adaptation to its audience, and
that the judgments of literary critics are valueless in determining the
probable appeal of a piece of writing to persons of another age or of other
interests than their own.

Another point upon which information would doubtless be welcomed
by students of medieval English culture is the class of society for which the
extant manuscripts of religious and secular literature were produced. Some
of us, agreeing with Professor Brown that the dominating principle during
the medieval period was art for instruction's sake, hold the view that until
after the beginning of the fourteenth century the ruling classes of England
found their literary entertainment mainly in the French language; that until
then neither the secular nor the religious writing in English was intended
for the upper classes; and consequently that a history of culture and taste
in England must take account of the French (and Latin) literature known
to have been read by medieval Englishmen as well as of the literature in
English. No one is perhaps so well equipped at the present time as Profes-
sor Brown to tell us what indications the quality and form of the manu-
scripts give as to the classes of society for which both religious and secular
literature were produced. He has voluminous notes in regard to the manu-
scripts, and his impressions of many of them must be fresh and clear. His
views would have a value not possessed by those of an editor pronouncing
on a single manuscript without a knowledge of the whole field.

J. M. M.

Modern Philology

VOLUME XVIII October IQ2O NUMBER 6

THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN HERDER'S
THOUGHT. II

HERDER'S CRITICISM OF THE PRINCIPLE OF "IMITATION OF NATURE"

Under the rule of the imagination, which through the influence
of the naturalistic philosophy had displaced the absolute reason of
classicism, or rather pseudo-classicism, as the aesthetic faculty,
Lessing concluded that modern art was no longer limited to the
beauty of Greek art (wrongly regarded by him as absolute), but had
gained for its range all "visible," i.e., concrete nature, of which
beauty, in Boileau's sense, is only a small part. In selecting its
objects of imitation from concrete nature, art must, however, use
discretion. It must give preference to those objects and to those
moments in the continuous sequence of events, which permit the
most play to the imagination. It must choose the "pregnant"
moment. Now, of all the possible moments, that of the culmination
of an event is the least fitted to stimulate imagination. For whatever
can be conceived as happening beyond that point must be inferior in
intensity and interest.

Further, in art, a formal permanence is given to a passing moment.
But no extreme stage can be regarded as enduring. De Lamettrie,
who had himself portrayed as Democritus, the laughing philosopher,

289] 57 [MoDEBN PHILOLOGY, October, 1920

58 MARTIN SCHUTZE

would on repeated view become more and more offensive. His
laugh would gradually appear as a hideous grin. Similarly, an
open-mouthed Laocoon would become disgusting; so would a raging
Ajax and a Medea depicted in the act of murdering her children.
The poet, on the other hand, whose means or "signs" of expres-
sion are not simultaneous as those of the artist, but successive, is
not bound to one moment. He can proceed successively and
cumulatively.

Herder points out the confusion involved in Lessing's demand
for the choice of a moment which is not transitory. The only part
of nature which is not transitory is dead nature. The life, the soul,
of any object is manifest in its transitoriness. In limiting art to
the intransitory parts of bodies we take from it ihren besten Ausdruck.
"Whatever living (seelenvolleri) expression," he argues, "we may
imagine in any body, is always transitory. The more the body
reveals a human passion, the more it represents a variable condition
of human nature." He continues to prove that Lessing's "pregnant "
moment is no more enduring than his climactic moment.

As well as I can say to a laughing Mettrie, on seeing him the third and
fourth time and finding him still laughing: "Thou art a coxcomb," I can
say to Myron's cow (a picture praised by Lessing) : "Why doest thou keep
on standing; why doest thou not go away?" For the same reason that I
find a roaring Laocoon finally intolerable, I should also ultimately, if some-
what later, grow weary of a sighing Laocoon because he never stops sighing.
Similarly, I should become bored with a standing Laocoon because he keeps
on standing instead of sitting down; and also of a rose by Huisum (a noted
painter of roses), because it keeps on blooming instead of withering.

In nature everything is transitory, passion of the soul and sensation of
the body, activity of the soul and motion of the body: every state of finite
and variable nature.

Thus every imitation of nature must as such be unnatural and irri-
tating because it unnaturally prolongs a transitory moment.

From this Herder concludes that the true purpose of art cannot
be objective at all but must be subjective. He rejects thereby the
entire theory of imitation, which is fundamentally objective.

He now proceeds to apply this new principle to poetry and art
by combining with it the Aristotelean distinction between "work"

290

THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN HERDER'S THOUGHT 59

and " energy."1 A "work" embodies a complete idea in a definitive
form. In the measure in which art succeeds in being such a "work,"
it is enduring, ewig. This use of the word ewig in the meaning of
formal perfection is common to the great German writers of the last
generation of the eighteenth century.2 It is the transcendentalistic,
subjective conception of eternity. The artist is to portray not a
moment in actual nature, for if literally permanent such a moment
would be lifeless, but den langen, seligen Ausdruck, the ewige Moment,
i.e., not an imitation of actuality but a synthesis which through its
perfection prevents repeated observation from becoming tiresome
and so has an abstract subjective element of permanence. The
reason why the extreme moment in any action is not fitted for art
is not that it is any more transitory than any other but that on
repeated view it becomes empty and tiresome.

Poetry, on the other hand, and all the arts which produce their
effects through the passing of moments in time, are forms of "energy"
in the Aristotelean sense. These arts3 must not, like pictorial art,
aim at one complete and supreme moment which would absorb all
our attention, but at an unbroken chain of actions of which each
moment would be only one link and not a detached climax.

He then defines the "beautiful," which is the subject of pictorial
art, as the quality which, by setting all its parts in a simultaneous
harmony, makes the whole a fit object for the ewige Anblick.

But even this static beauty of pictorial art is, according to Herder,
not an objective form as it is to Lessing, but a symbolic or character-
istic expression of the nature of the human soul. It also is secondary
to personality.

Physical beauty is not sufficient. For through our eyes there peers a
soul, and therefore a soul must peer through the physical beauty portrayed

1 This distinction between "work" and "energy" had been used before Herder by
the English writer Harris.

2 Cf. Goethe's

"Er kann dem Augenblick

Dauer verleihen,"

in "Das Gottliche"; also "Dauer im Wechsel." See Introduction to my edition of
Goethe's Poems, pp. iv f.

»"Mussen keinen Augenblick ein HOchstes lief era, wie auch unsre Seele in dies
augenblickliche HOchste verschlingen wollen, denn sonst wird eben die Annehmlichkeit
gestort, die in der Polge, in der Verbindung und Abwechslung dieser Augenblicke und
Handlungen beruht, und jeden Augenblick nur als ein Glied der Kette, nicht weiter,
nutzt. Wird einer dieser Augenblicke, Zustande und Handlungen, eine Insel, ein
abgetrenntes Hochstes, so geht das Wesen der energischen Kunst verloren."

291

60 MARTIN SCHUTZE

for us. And in which state should this soul shine forth ? Without doubt,
in that which can sustain my view longest. And which is that ? No state
of idle calm which suggests nothing to me; none expressing itself in exaggera-
tions, which would clip the wings of my imagination; but rather the motion
which is, as it were, about to declare itself, the dawn of action which offers
a view in both directions and thus presents in the inexhaustible wealth of its
outlook, what may be called the "eternal view."1

PERSONALITY AT REST AND IN ACTION

The crisis of the conflict has now been reached in Herder's
criticism of Lessing's application of the sensualistic theories to the
techniques of poetry and art. Since, argues Lessing, the eye takes
in objects simultaneously grouped in space, the "signs" of visual
expression, which are the natural means of pictorial expression, as
lines and colors (and values, of which Lessing and his literary con-
temporaries knew naught) are fit to "imitate" or represent objects
only in the simultaneous spatial order. The "signs" of poetry, i.e.,
articulate sound, being successive,2 can "imitate" objects only in the
order of time.

Lessing illustrates these conclusions with some passages from the
Iliad and the classical Greek tragedies, and with further conclusions
drawn from the Laocoon group.

In his principal thesis Lessing states the fundamental difference
between the two arts in question thus, that pictorial art "imitates"
or represents one simultaneous static relation of objects in space,
whereas poetry "imitates" successive objects occurring in time.
The latter he calls actions. He finds this distinction borne out by
two scenes in the Iliad, namely, the making of the bow of Pandarus
and the council of the gods. He defines the former as a progressive
visible action, the different parts of which occur consecutively in
time; the latter as a static visible action, the different parts of which
develop simultaneously (nebeneinander) in space. He proceeds to
define "bodies" as "objects which or the parts of which coexist

1 " . . . . Sondern die sich gleichsam anktindigende Bewegung, die uns zu beiden
Seiten hinschauen lasst und also einzig und allein ewigen Ausblick gewahrt." Herder
has a strong, poetical predilection for the moment of dawn, in its literal as well as meta-
phorical sense. Dawn is the mirror of youth to his ardent, ever-young spirit.

«And "arbitrary," i.e., symbolic in regard to their meaning. The distinction of
"natural" and "arbitrary" "signs" played a considerable part in the aesthetic theories
of Dubos and Harris and others. See p. 72, footnote.

292

THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN HERDER'S THOUGHT 61

simultaneously in space"; and "actions" as "objects which or whose
parts occur successively in time." This limitation of poetry to
" actions" is the result of the successive nature of its signs of expres-
sion. For in order to produce the illusion, the poet must adapt his
imitation of objects to the successive order of expression imposed
by the nature of his medium. Lessing applies this theory to an analy-
sis of the Homeric description of the shield of Achilles, pointing out
that the classical poet cast this description in the form of an account of
the making of the shield. If, he concludes from that, a poet wishes
to describe, he must follow the example of Homer and turn the static
object in space, of which he wishes to produce a picture in the mind
of his audience, into a succession of objects in time. He severely
criticizes his contemporaries, especially Haller, for having written
descriptive poetry.

This distinction between the two arts is crucial, and Herder's
criticism of its various elements strikes at the foundations not only
of Lessing's theories but of the entire complex tradition on which they
rest, and at the same time lays down the foundations of his own
theories. Herder corrects Lessing's definition of action by pointing
out that "the idea of succession is only a part of the idea of action.
Only succession produced by a spontaneous force (Successives durch
Kraft)1 is action." Succession is a pure abstraction, whereas action
is a concrete embodiment of a living force.2

Lessing, by pushing his sensualistic theories too far, confounds
the sequence of verbal sounds with the associations of images and
ideas, which are the true objects of poetic discourse. These ideas,
while perceived by means of a succession of sounds, yet follow a
principle of association independent of those sounds. This principle
must be embodied in the spontaneous forces which turn succession
into action. Herder calls the associative bond "coherence of
imaginative ideas (zusammenhdngende Bildergriffe).

It is therefore wrong to limit poetry to succession in time. For,
though uttered in succession, it yet belongs also to space because

1 Kraft to Herder meant a spontaneous principle, as will be shown later.

2 " Ich denke nur ein in der Zeitfolge wirkendes Wesen, ich denke nur Veranderungen .
die durch die Kraft einer Substanz [the Leibnitzian monad!] auf einanderf olgen : so wird
Handlung. Und sind Handlungen der Gegenstand der Dichtkunst, so wette ich, wird
dieser Gegenstand nie aus dem trocknen Begriffe der Succession bestimmt werden
konnen."

62 MARTIN SCHUTZE

it is concrete action. Poetry thus being at home both in the spheres
of time and space is the " discourse of perfect sensibility" (sinnlich
vollkommne Rede).

Herder adds that Lessing's argument fails also because it proves
too much. For if the succession of the sounds of speech determined
the sequence of ideas, then prose and every form of scientific discourse
would also have to forego description — which is absurd.

Herder now develops his own theory in an analysis of the Homeric
accounts of the assembling of Juno's chariot by Hebe, of the making
of the bow of Pandarus, and of the fashioning of the shield of Achilles
by Vulcan.

The " action" of Hebe's putting together the chariot of Juno
(Iliad E 722-31) is so detailed and gradual that by the time the last
part is added the hearer has forgotten the first. If the poet had aimed
at giving a picture of the chariot as a whole, i.e., if his action had
served the purpose of description or imitation of an object, his method
would have been unsuccessful.

Next, as to the bow of Pandarus, he says:

If Homer, in order to depict the bow of Pandarus, has first to make us
follow the hunt of the ibex from whose horns the bow is to be made ; has to
show us the rock where Pandarus kills his game, and how he measures the
length of the horns; then takes us to the craftsman and makes us witness
every detail of the manufacture of the bow — how can anyone conclude
from this that Homer had intended to have the succession of the events of
his narrative, as it were, coincide with the conditions of coexistence in space,
by making the description of the different parts of the bow keep pace with
the progress of his discourse ? It is impossible to assume that Homer, unless
one regards him as a bungler, intended a description of the bow.

Herder's interpretation of the story is the following: Homer is
not concerned with the description of the bow as such. He tells
progressive actions because he has to keep pace with the general
progress of his main action. He only acquaints us with the bow of
Pandarus so far as the associations awakened by the bow are essential
to the progress of his story. We learn the story of the bow not to
be interested in its details as such, but to gain a conception, the most
vivid, concrete, forceful conception possible, of the prowess of Pan-
darus, the might of his arm, the strength of the bow, and the terrible
possibilities of his use of it. "When Pandarus now takes the bow,

294

THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN HERDER'S THOUGHT 63

draws the string, places the arrow, releases the string — woe to
Menelaus struck by an arrow from such a bow! We know!"

Homer does not intend to give a picture of a "work" but an
account of an "energy"; he is not concerned with the bow as an
independent object, but chiefly as an appropriate dramatic symbol of
an action involving its owner and its victim.

Similarly, the putting together of the chariot of Juno by Hebe
does not serve the purpose of description. Hebe, a goddess, is not
put to the pains of a minutely detailed task, in order that we may
have a complete, simultaneous visual picture of a lifeless object,
but in order that we gain a vivid impression of the excellence, the
perfection of the parts, the value, the importance symbolized by the
exquisite care bestowed by Hebe, a goddess, on the conveyance
worthy of the queen of the Olympians. Homer did not aim at
description of an object, but at an account of a characteristic and
interesting action involving beautiful and momentous personalities.

The true poetic purpose of the story of the shield of Achilles is
similar. The greatest hero of the Trojan War is in need of a shield;
Thetis, his mother, a goddess, begs one of Vulcan, another god. He
promises, rises, goes to work. "The whole scene is part of the
action of the poem, of the progress of the epic," and is in no way an
instance of a manner peculiar to Homer.

In the making, in the growth, of the shield, there lies all the power of
the "energy," the continuous process determined by a living force, which is
the poet's aim. In every figure which Vulcan engraves upon the shield, I
admire the creative god, in every indication of the proportions and the sur-
face I recognize the mighty shield which is to serve Achilles, and for which
the reader, absorbed in the action, longs as eagerly as Thetis.

Herder continues,

In short, I know no successions in Homer, which had to serve as artifices,
as makeshifts, in the place of descriptions or static pictures. These succes-
sions are the essence of his poem, they are the body of epic action If

Homer requires a physical picture he describes it, even if it is a Thersites;
he wots not of artifices, of poetic tricks or hazards; progress is the soul of
his epic.

Herder's method of attack is that of individualizing essential
features, which Lessing had failed to analyze. He overcomes

295

64 MARTIN SCHUTZE

Lessing by proof of overgeneralization. He shows that in the dis-
cussion of the Greek idea of beauty, in the definition of the synthetic
moment, which is the proper subject of pictorial art, in the definition
of action as identical with succession, in the identification of the
successive nature of the sounds of speech with the order of association
of ideas, Lessing failed to take into account the one essential factor
common to all these matters, namely, individual personality. He
concludes that personality must be the essential principle of poetry
and art.

He did not at this time see the full theoretic significance of his
idea, which required some ten years to reach maturity. At the
time of our Wdldchen he was still strongly under the influence of
Leibnitz. In his endeavor to give his conclusion theoretic unity
and the proper philosophical form of generalization, he borrowed
from Leibnitz the term " force" (Kraft), which expresses the active
element of the monad, Leibnitz' embodiment of the primary, abso-
lute, unchangeable, and irreplaceable principle of spontaneous indi-
viduality. The fundamental importance of this conception lies in
the fact that in Leibnitz' philosophy for the first time in modern
thought the principle of personality is opposed to the objective
absolute reason of French rationalism and the objective — and
equally absolute ! — nature of the British realism of Bacon and Locke
as the primary fact of reality.

This principle appears in the more concrete form of Naturwilch-
sigkeit (native spontaneity), as the central idea in the thought of
Bodmer and Breitinger.

This idea, far deeper and broader than the more limited concep-
tion of Rousseau, which involves rather the more primary impulses
and emotions together with personifications of the inanimate forces
of nature, than the complete human personality, is the particular
philosophical contribution of the German mind to the thought of the
eighteenth century. This is the fundamental motive in Herder's
entire work. It is the more unfortunate that German systematic
philosophy was for generations diverted from its most characteristic
heritage by the masterfully keen, but narrow, dry, and too featureless
genius of Kant, who turned the vigorous fresh current into the
formalism of Cartesian rationalism, methodologically qualified by

296

THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN HERDER'S THOUGHT 65

psychological infusion drawn from Berkeley and Hume. Abandoned
by Kant, this immensely fruitful idea was left to the violent and
immature conceit of the Storm and Stress movement which cari-
catured it, and to the morbid egoism of the Romantic movement
which perverted it. Even in the classical decade beginning in
1790, the rationalistic influence, as will be shown in a later chapter,
frustrated many of its vital impulses.

This idea persists throughout Herder's life, forming the funda-
mental motive of all his important theories: That the world of all
reality, as well as that of art and poetry, consists primarily of indi-
viduals, not one of which is like any other, and each of which is
necessary to the whole and must preserve its essential character.
This is the essence of Herder's humanism.

To return to the specific question, individual personality is the
primary fact of aesthetic reality. The aim of all the arts is " truth
and expressiveness" (Wahrheit und Ausdruck) of personality. All
other facts, external objects, abstract ideas as well as the forms and
techniques, are conditioned by this. " Imitation" thus loses signifi-
cance as a principle and becomes a secondary form of expression.
Poetry is at liberty to use either description or succession to suit
its main purpose. Not description as such is wrong, but description
in the wrong place and manner.1

Under the theory of personality there can be no absolute, uni-
versal, necessary beauty, but only relative appropriateness as an
expression of a specific form of personality. Art and poetry are
not interested in the representation of objects except inasmuch as
they serve to characterize individuality.

This is not merely a correction and qualification of details of
Lessing's doctrine, but an original and fundamentally new orientation
in reality.

The chief difficulties inherent in Herder's view will be discussed
in a later chapter.

It is no longer necessary henceforth to discuss Lessing's theories
in detail. Herder's criticism has taken away their foundations.
We shall limit ourselves to a brief summary of the remaining main

» See also chapter xviii of the Wdldchen, which contains Herder's summary of his
conclusions regarding "energy" in poetry.

297

66 MARTIN SCHUTZE

theses of Herder's essay, which easily reveal their significance,
because they are simple applications of his fundamental idea of
personality.

"GODS AND MENTAL BEINGS, PERSONIFIED ABSTRACTIONS "

Lessing, following the rationalistic logic, had assumed that the
gods represented in pictorial art are personified abstractions. To the
painter, "Venus is nothing except love." Poetry, on the other hand,
treats gods like beings in action (handelnde Weseri).

Herder, in chapter xi, puts this subject also on the proper ground.
The poets, he says, were the makers of mythology. Homer's gods
are "heavenly individuals," which have added to them certain
typical characters. They are "not," as Lessing asserts, "merely
beings in action, which, in addition to their general characters, have
other traits and emotions, which may according to circumstance,
predominate over the former"; but "their true nature consists in
those other traits and emotions, whereas their general character is
only a later generalization of those individual traits. This generaliza-
tion is incomplete and subordinate and is often not taken into con-
sideration by the poets," who are interested in individuals. "If
pictorial art has to give its gods typical rather than individual char-
acters, it does not manifest thereby its essence but its mechanical
limitations." Venus, for instance, is not limited to "typical " actions.
She may rave and rage; she is still no abstraction of love but the
goddess of love, the mother of Cupid, the woman in love, in concrete
reality."

The actions of the gods as well as of human individuals reveal
their characters. Therefore pictorial poetry, illustrated by Horace,
is weak.1 Poetry has more direct symbols of action than art.

In judging of the size and the appearance of gods in Homer we
must consider first not general ideas but their individual characters.
Charakter ist hier uber Gotiheit; i.e., individuality is here above type.

There follow in chapter xv in a discussion of translations from
Homer very interesting stylistic remarks, the main significance of
which from our point of view is the principle of individuality applied

i The chief advocate of pictorial poetry in the eighteenth century was Daniel Webb,
whereas the French writer Caylus advised the artists to "imitate" passages from the
classical poets.

298

THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN HERDER'S THOUGHT 67

to style. One of the most characteristic elements of Homer's style
he finds in "a certain manner of repeating some principal feature
that had appeared before and now serves as a means for continuing
the picture and binding into unity different sections which otherwise
would fall apart."1

Lessing overgeneralized not only in dealing with the relations
between art and poetry, but even in his analysis of poetry as such.
On the premise that Homer depicts progressive actions, Lessing con-
cludes that poetry as such is limited to actions. Herder applies his
method of individuation to this subject also. Part of the passage
is so characteristic that it invites literal transcription: " Homer
creates in narration: 'it occurred! it came into being!' Everything
with him can therefore be action and must hasten on to action.
That is the aim of the energy of his Muse. Marvelous, pathetic
events are his world. His word of creation says: 'It came into
being.'" But "Anacreon hovers between song and narrative. His
story becomes a song; his little song an epic of the god of love. He
can choose this turn: 'it was,' or 'I will,' or 'thou shalt' — enough if
his melos resounds with joy and pleasure; a lofty emotion is the
energy of each one of his songs." Pindar, the odic singer, has still
another purpose: "A poetic picture, in which is visible everywhere,
not the work of art as such but the artist: 'Behold me, singing'!"

He sums up :

Where can there be a comparison? The total production of Homer,
Anacreon, Pindar, how different! How unlike the achievement they
intend! The one narrates; the whole of the event is his aim; he is the poet
of the past. The other one does not intend to speak; joy itself sings through
him; the complete expression of a delightful sensation is his purpose. The
third speaks that we hear him; the whole of his ode is very skilful and
symmetrical structure.

It is therefore wrong to regard as Lessing does the work of one
poet, no matter how great, as embodying the rules of all poetry.
Each type of poetry, each individual poet must be judged on the
basis of particular character, gifts, and purposes.

The last part of the Wdldchen, beginning with chapter xxi, is
devoted to the discussion of the ugly and the disgusting. The

1 ". . . . ein gewisses Wiederkommen auf einen Hauptzug, der schon da war und
jezt das Band sein soil, um das Bild welter zu fiihren und die auseinander fallenden
Zuge zu einem Ganzen zu verknupfen."

299

68 »MARTIN SCHUTZE

details do not concern us here. But the ground on which his con-
clusions rest is important. It is another logical application of his
principle of personality. Lessing followed the rationalistic theory
in regarding ugliness as an absolute formal principle expressing the
negation of the classical idea of the beautiful. He analyzed the term
no more than he did that of the beautiful. Herder, having sub-
ordinated formal absolute beauty to personality, proceeded likewise
with that of the ugly. Ugly is that which embodies an ugly per-
sonality. Lessing, bound by the rationalistic theory that the
Greeks did not portray ugliness, had been hard put to it in accounting
for Thersites in the Iliad. His final solution, which was an evasion
(but an evasion forced upon the whole pseudo-classicism, which he
followed), is that ugliness might serve the purposes of humor. "Homer
made Thersites ugly in order to make him ridiculous." Herder, on
the other hand, proves that Homer was very much in earnest in
creating Thersites. Thersites "is not a ridiculous but a malicious,
snarling rascal; he has the blackest soul of all the men before Troy."
He is made more contemptible by having to suffer a trouncing at the
hands of Ulysses. That by taking himself seriously he now and
then makes himself ridiculous is true; but this ludicrousness is
only a secondary quality in him.

Lessing, as pseudo-classicists generally, was forced by his abso-
lute formalism to derive the conception of the terrible as well as the
ridiculous from the ugly. Herder calls attention to the beauty of
certain forms of homeliness based on character. He also shows
that the ridiculous need not be ugly. Nor is the "terrible," which
Lessing defined as the "dangerously ugly," dependent on ugliness.
The Homeric gods are terrible, but certainly not ugly.

The expression of specific personalities, either in a static simul-
taneous form in space or in a continuous progressive action in time,
is the subject of all art and poetry; that is the thesis of Herder's
first Wdldchen.

The immediate questions arising from Herder's main conclusion
are whether and in what respects personality is the measure, not only
of the works created by art and poetry, but also of the poet and artist,
and of the public which is both audience and creative environment

300

THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN HERDER'S THOUGHT 69

of the author and his works. As to the significance of the thing created,
Herder is most explicit. The subject of art is an individual per-
sonality. The objects and events are not primarily introduced as
parts of objective reality, but as subordinate manifestations of
personality. They are part of the machinery of characterization
and not imitations of objects of nature. They are, as Herder saw
clearly and showed in his analysis of the Homeric stories of the bow
of Pandarus, the chariot of Juno, and the shield of Achilles, not
primary, but symbolic in their significance.

Herder's sound sense of reality kept him from pressing the
symbolic function of objective reality too far. It was left to the
Romantic movement to develop this symbolic part of objectivity
into a subjective monism, in order to remove all obstacles from a
vision of a universal absolute force of personality, and so, by ignoring
the objective relations of personality, to destroy that also.

Herder, however, was somewhat lacking in the formal sense,
both in composition and in style, and his ear was not sensitive to
the finest music and cadences of diction. Though in this respect
far in advance of his contemporaries among the aesthetical critics
and of most of the poets as well, it becomes now and then obvious
that he does not make a clear distinction between the natural truth
of characters portrayed and the artistic truth which produces focus
in a work of art. His conception of the "energy" as a continuous
expression of individualities leads him to neglect the requirements of
constructive unity.

There is one aspect of this question of which Herder was at this
time apparently unconscious, namely, the part of personality in a
work of art treating of inanimate nature, i.e., of landscape art.
Herder, at the time of the first Wdldchen knew nothing of landscape
painting, and never had much opportunity and inclination to study
it. Even the poetical aspects of external nature had not, at this
time, revealed themselves to him to any significant extent. His
nature-sense did not awaken until a few years later during the soli-
tude and homesickness of his Biickeburg days. But after that time,
he gave his conception of personality a remarkable extension by
including in it a symbolic interpretation of nature, which in beauty,

301

70 'MARTIN SCHUTZB

magnificence, and penetration has not been surpassed in critical
literature. This will appear in the discussion of his Geist der
Ebrdischen Poesie.

Herder has indicated his conclusions regarding the relativity of
the significance of works of art and poetry with regard to the personalities
of their creators, in his rejection of Lessing's attempt to make Homer
the standard of all poetry, and in his differentiation of Homer,
Anacreon, and Pindar. Individualization of each creative genius
in each particular work is his critical aim. It also is his particular
gift, in which he surpassed all the men of his era. Unequaled in
sympathetic discernment, the rarest gift of the creative critic, Herder
became the greatest and most fruitful interpreter of poetry and of the
humanistic movements of history, in which a fine and profound sense
of the creative personality is the chief requirement. This gift of
individualization will be discussed in detail in connection with his
works on folk poetry, on the forces determining the subjects and
character of poetry, on translations, on genius and related subjects,
and on the Ideen and the Humanitatsbriefe.

The relations of the public to the works of art and poetry can be
discussed to better advantage in a later chapter, in which Herder's
views on the influence of environment on personality are interpreted.

Another important question is that of the specific formal elements
pertaining to his conception of beauty as conditioned by personality.
Herder was occupied with it at the time of our Waldchen, and reached
interesting and important conclusions. These will be presented in
a later chapter devoted to Herder's theories regarding the forces
which determine personality and so control its valuation.

MARTIN SCHUTZE
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

NOTE

We regret that irregularity in the mail service and editorial oversight
occasioned in the June instalment of this article the following typographical
errors: p. 1, 1. 16, read the for an before absolute; p. 2, 1. 19, supply comma
after Ideen; p. 4, 1. 22, omit the after of and read achievement for achieve-
ments; p. 4, 1. 29, read is for in before his; p. 8, footnote, read Stein for
Hein and insert "op. cit." after Howard; p. 9, 1. 1, read dangers for angers;
p. 9, 1. 10, read Holbach for Holboch; p. 9, 1. 30, supply commas after but
and were, and read by the processes of for in accordance with; p. 10, 1. 8,
read Mars for "Mars"; pp. 10 ff., read Laocoon for Laokoon except in title
of Lessing's work; p. 10, footnote, read Batteux/or Batteaux.

302

GERMANIC ^-GEMINATION. II

GERM. -$w-:-dd-

68. ME. dudd, dudde 'a, coarse cloak,' NE. duds ' clothes' (used
disparagingly), OHG tutta (tuta), tutto (tuto) 'Brustwarze, weibl.
Brust/ Norw. dodd 'tuft, wisp; heap/ early Du. dodde 'Stengel,
Stift/ Du. dodde 'liebkosende Benennung fur ein Kind/ from *<fu$w-:
Norw. dott 'tuft; heap/ dotta 'pile in little heaps,' dytta 'stop up,
make tight; dam up; cram, pack/ OE. dyttan 'shut (ears); stop
(mouth)'; OS. dodro, OHG. totoro 'Dotter/ NHG. Styr. tudel
'kurzes, dickes Weib; Puppe/ Skt. dudhitah 'dick, dicht, steif/
dudhrdh 'steif, storrig' (cf. Mod. Phil, XI, 333). Cf. No. 26.

69. Norw. krodda 'Kase von eingekochter Milch/ ME. crudde
'curds/ Germ. *krudw~, *krudu-:Ir. gruth (*grutu-) 'geronnene
Milch, Quark' (Fick, IP, 119; IIP, 54).

70. OE. codd'bag; cod, shell, husk/ ON. kodde 'cushion/ OSwed.
kodde 'Hode/ MDu. codde idem, from *kutfwa-n- : Lat. guttus 'a
vessel for liquids,' *gutuos 'round object/ Goth, qipus (*guetus)
'belly/ OE. cwidele 'inflamed swelling/ ceod 'pouch, vessel.' Cf.
No. 25.

71. MHG. ratte 'Kornrade, agrostemma/ NHG. Swiss, Bav.
ratte, Germ, stem *retiwan-, *radwan- : early NHG. ratwen, OHG.
rato, OLG. rada (cf. Fick, IIP, 337).

72. OE. ruddoc, ME. ruddok, NE. dial, ruddock 'robin redbreast/
Germ. *ructwaka-:Lith. rudugys 'September,' ruduti 'rotlichbraun
werden/ ruddvimas 'das Braunwerden/ ruduszis 'Rotauge, cyprinus
rutilus/ rudas 'rotlich braun/ OE. rudu 'red color, rouge; redness.'

73. OE. pudd 'ditch/ Germ. *pudwa-:Gr. pvwos 'the depths of
the sea' (*budhuos or *budhios), pvcrffaKoL-pbdpoi, Hes., fivOos 'the
depth, esp. of the sea/ /3u0tos 'in the deep, sunken, deep/ ra /360ta
'water-animals/ (3vdl£u 'immerse, sink/ ME. podel 'puddle/ base
*budh- 'press down; sink; press, pack, cram, make big; swell, etc./
also in the following (cf. IE. ax 51).

303] 71 [MoDEEN PHILOLOGY, October, 1920

72 FRANCIS A. WOOD

74. MDu. podde 'toad/ pudde 'eel-pout/ Westfal. puddek
'lump, pudding, sausage/ NE. pudding, poddy 'round and stout in
the belly/ LG. puddig 'thick, swollen/ Germ, putiwa- 'swollen;
swelling, lump':OE. pudoc 'wen, wart/ NE. dial, pud 'paw/ MLG.
pudel 'Dose, Beutel.' Cf. No. 28.

75. Norw. dial, skadda, skodda 'Nebel' (ON. *skadda, gen.
*skpddu), MHG. schatte (schate) 'Schatten/ Germ. *ska<fwa- and
skatfu-:Goih. skadus 'shadow/ OHG. scato, gen. scatuwes, Gr.
a KOTOS 'darkness' (cf. Fick, III,4 449).

76. OE. sceadd 'shad, clupea alosa/ Norw. skadd 'kleiner
Schnapel/ Germ. *skatiwa- 'thin, pointed ':OE. scceppa 'nail'
(No. 61). For meaning compare NHG. schndpel 'der Fisch salmo
laveretus, mit sich schnabelartig spitzig verlangernder Schnauze.'
To this primary meaning the use of NE. shad points: shad-bird 'the
common American snipe; the common European sandpiper' (both
birds so called from their pointed bills, not "with reference to their
appearance at the shad-fishing season," which might apply to
many other birds); shad-bellied 'thin-bellied/ the opposite of
pot-bellied.

These are from a pre-Germ. stem *skh9tu- 'strip, thin piece/
Goth, skapuls 'schadlich/ skapjan ' schaden, ' Gr. affKrjOrjs 'unharmed/
root *skhe-i- : Skt. chydti 'schneidet ab/pp. chdtah, chitdh, Gr. <rxacns
'a pricking, scarifying/ crxacu 'split' (c^fco, Skt. chindtti, Lat. stindo,
etc.), o"xafw 'slit, lance; burst open (of flowers)/ Gxaffrypiov 'lancet ' :
ON. skata ' Glattrochen/ Norw. skata 'Elster' ("nach dem spitz
auslaufenden Schwanze benannt," Fick, IIP, 448), skata 'in eine
Spitze hinauslaufen/ skat 'Wipfel eines Baumes/ Swed. dial, skate
'etwas Hervorspringendes, Wipfel, Landspitze.'

GERM. -kw-:-kk-

77. OHG. acchus, accus, ackes 'ax/ Germ. *akwisjo-, akwizjo-:
Goth, aqizi 'ax.' With i-syncopation also WGerm. *akus- in OS.,
OLFranc. acus, OHG. achus} whence the u in acchus for *acchis.

78. OHG. nackot 'nackt/ ON. nfikkueftr, npkkuefir idem, etc.,
Germ. *nakwida-, *nakwada-} Goth, naqaps, etc. (pre-Germ. *nog^-
odho-, -edho- 'nudus'), whence later also by syncope *naku$a-:
MSwed. nakudher, OE. nacod, OHG. nahhut, etc.

3(M

GERMANIC ^-GEMINATION

79. ON. nokkue 'Nachen/ stem *nakwan- and, with loss of w,
*nakan in OE. naca, OS. naco, OHG. nahho.

80. ON. slfikkua (slfikua) 'loschen, stillen/ *slakwian, pre-Germ.
*s£og#-:Lat. langueo, Gr. Xcryapoj, ON. slakr 'slack' (cf. Walde2, 410).

81. OHG. nicchessa, MHG. nickes 'Nix/ *nikwes- (and *nikus~,
nikuz in OHG. nihhus, ON. nykr, OE. nicor), pre-Germ. *nigues-t
Gr. j>i£co, fut. j>t^co 'wash.'

82. ON. rfikkr 'darkness': Goth, riqis idem, Gr. epefios, Skt.
rrfjioft.

83. Olcel. vfikkua 'zum Fliessen bringen/ ONorw. pres. vcekkir:
QN.vpkr 'feucht/ from *vakuz, Germ. *wakwaz, IE. *y,oguo-, Lat.
uvidus, Gr. vypbs 'wet.'

84. ME. wricken, NE. dial, wn'cfc 'twist, turn,' Swed. vricka,
Dan. vrikke 'move, turn, wriggle, sprain,' Du., LG. wrikken 'move
to and fro,' -kk- from -kw-:Goih. wraiqs. Or in this case -kk- may
be from -kn~:Gi. PIK.VOS 'bent.'

85. ON. ace. kuikkuan, kykkuan 'living' (nom. kuikr from
*kwikur, OE. cwicu, Germ, stem *kwikwa-, pre-Germ. *guiguo-,
Lett, dfiga 'life,' cf. Walde2, 846), OHG. quek, gen. queckes, OLFr.
quicca fe 'live stock.'

86. ON. pykkr, piukkr 'thick,' OE. piece, OFries. thikke, OS.
thikki, OHG. dicchi, etc., Germ. *pekwa- (*fieku):Ir. tiug (*tegu-)
'thick.'

87. OE. paccian 'pat, flap/ NIcel. pjokka 'schlagen, klopfen':
OS. thako-lon 'streicheln/ *paku-lon, Lat. tango, Gr. Terayuv (cf.
Fick, III4, 565).

88. OE. haccian 'hack/ *hakwon, OFris. tohahkia 'zerhacken/
MLG., MHG. hacken, hacke 'Hacke':MHG. hachel, hechel 'Hechel/
NE. hatchel, hetchel, heckle 'comb for flax or hemp/ verb 'comb, as
flax or hemp; tease with questions/ OE. haca 'hook/ hacod 'pike
(fish)/ OS. hacud idem.

89. OE. scecce ace. 'quarrel, strife/ WGerm. *sakwa, Germ.
*saA;iyp:OE. nom. sacu, WGerm. *sak(w)u, Germ. *sakwo, pre-
Germ. *(p)sog-ud-:Goih. saku-ls ' streitsiichtig/ sakan 'streiten/
OHG. sahhan 'tadeln, schelten, vor Gericht streiten/ ON. saka
'injure; blame, find fault with/ Gr. \boyos 'blame, censure/ \l/eya)
'lessen, disparage, blame/ Skt. psati 'zehrt auf, zerkaut/ etc. These

305

74 FRANCIS A. WOOD

are to be separated from OE. forsacan 'forsake, relinquish; refuse;
deny/ OHG. forsahhan 'refuse; deny/ Goth, sokjan 'seek/ etc.

GERM. -hw-:-hh-

90. OHG. ahha (aha)1 aqua': Goth, aha; firllche (firllhe) Verleihe':
Goth. leih)ai; nahhitun 'nah ten' : Goth, nehiidedun; sehhan 'sehen/
sdhhun 'sahen' (here analogical) : Goth, saifoan, sehun (cf. Braune,
Ahd. Gram., § 154, Anm. 6).

91. OE. tiohhian, Angl. tihhian (*tihwojari) 'arrange; determine,
consider' (Biilbring, § 541), to which add the geminated MHG.
zechen 'fiigen, anordnen, schaffen, veranstalten ; zechen' (OHG.
*zehhon, zehon), zeche 'Anordnung, Reihenfolge, Zunft, Zechgesell-
schaft/ MLG. teche, techge, teghe idem, Goth, tewa 'Ordnung/ pre-
Germ. *de%-:Serb.-Cr. u-desavati, -desiti 'richten, zurecht machen;
treffen/ OBulg. desiti 'finden/ Lat. decet, decus, Skt. dagasydti
'erweist Ehre, ist gnadig/ dagati 'erweist Verehrung, gewahrt.'

92. OE. ceahhettan 'laugh loudly/ *kahwatjan (Biilbring, §541),
from an OE. *ceahhian preserved in NE. chaff 'assail with sarcastic
banter or ridicule, make game of, banter, ridicule/ sb. 'banter,
ridicule/ MHG. kach 'lautes Lachen' (*kahwa-), kachen, kachzen,
OHG. kachazzen, kahhazzen 'laut lachen.'

93. OE. cohhetan 'cough; shout/ *kuhwatjan, *cohhian,
*cuhhian, ME. coghen, coughen (couweri), NE. cough (kof), MDu.
cochen, cuchen 'cough, wheeze; groan/ LG. kuchen, kuchen 'keuchen/
MHG. kuchen idem.

94. OE. seohhe 'strainer, Seihe/ *sihwon- (Bulbring, §541),
MLG. sigge (sige, sie) 'Seihe/ siggen (slgen, sien) 'seihen' (or these
with -gg- from -gw-\ NHG. Tyrol, seichen 'seihen/ MDu. sichene
'Sieb/ and perhaps also sichten 'sichten; seihen' (*sihwatjant),
IE. root *seiq*.

95. OE. geneahhe 'sufficiently; frequently/ *nahwe, *noHyfed:
Lith. naszus 'gute Friichte tragend, fruchtbar/ neszti 'tragen/ Lat.
nanciscor ' reach/ Goth, ganah ' genugt/ etc., and probably nefas ' nahe.'

96. MDu. crochen 'groan, moan/ Du. dial, krochen, kruchen
'groan; wheeze/ MLG. krochen 'grunzen, krachzen/ *kruhw-:Gr.
ypvfa 'grunt, mutter/ ypvKros 'to be muttered.'

97. OE. pohha 'pouch, bag/ *puhwan- 'swelling/ MLG. poche
(and pocke) 'Blatter, Pustel/ puchen (puggen) 'pochen, trotzen/
MDu. pochen puchen 'bacchari, debacchari; tonare murmure et

306

GERMANIC ^-GEMINATION 75

verberibus; et jactare, jactitare'ipoggre 'toad' (*pugw-), Gr. (3vKavrj
'trumpet/ Russ.-Ch.Sl. bucati ' drolmen,' Pol. buczec' 'briillen, tonen,
weinen/ buczyc sig 'sich aufblasen/ buczny 'stolz, prahlerisch;
iibermutig/ etc. (cf. Berneker, I, 98 f.). In this group occur the
geminations kk, hh, gg.

98. WS., Kent, geohhol, Angl. gehhol 'Yule, Christmas' and
WS., Kent, hweohhol 'wheel' are given in Biilbring, Ae. El., § 543, as
examples of "Dehnung vor 1." But both of these words had an h
followed by w, and this was the cause of the gemination. For
geohhol represents Germ. *jehwla-, while geol 'Yule/ geola 'Decem-
ber/ Goth, jiuleis idem are from *je(g)wl-, IE. *ieqy-lo-:Gr. e\l/la
'sport, game, amusement' (cf. Boisacq, s.v.). So also hweohhol;
hweog(u)l, hweowol, hweol come from *hwehwla-; *hwegwla-:Skt.
cakr&m 'wheel.'

99. OHG. nihhein, nechein, nohhein, 'keiner'; dihhein, dehhein,
dechein (thegeiri), thohhein 'irgend ein' are explained as having
"secondary gemination" from original nihein, dihein, etc., in
which h was final and therefore a spirant (nih-eiri), but in composi-
tion was drawn over in part to the second syllable (nih-heiri), and so
properly written as a gemination (cf. Braune, Ahd. Gr., § 154,
Anna. 6). This explanation would imply the formation of nihhein,
etc., in OHG. from nih and ein. The compounds must have been
much earlier (:OS. nig en, negen), and as collocations even pre-
Germ. Nihhein represents Germ. *nehwe ainaz 'neque unus';
nohhein (which need not be regarded as having o for e in the proclitic
position, Braune, § 29, Anm. 3) from *nuhwe ainaz : OHG. noch
'neque/ probably identical with noh, Goth, nauh 'noch, adhuc/
with the negative force derived from its use with ni, and also influ-
enced by nih. Or noh 'neque' may come from *n-u-que:n- from
*ene 'not/ Lat. ne, ne-} and also in- 'un-/ Gr. ai>- (en-), a- (n-)', -u-,
perhaps an ablaut form of Lat. -ve, ve-, OBulg. u- (Gr. ou?), and
added to the negative in Gr. avev 'without' (*en-eu), Goth, inu
(*en-u), OHG. ano (*en-ou). Dihhein, dehhein 'irgend ein' comes
from Germ. *pehwe ainaz, pre-Germ. *teqve 'irgend', stem *to-, *te~,
whence also *te-s in Goth. pis-hun 'juaXiora/ -foaduh 'whithersoever/
-hah 'whatever/ -foaruh 'wherever/ -tvazuh 'whoever.' Similarly
thohhein is formed from a *tu-que, which is also in OHG. doh 'doch/
from an IE. stem *tu, tuo-:Skt. tva-h, tua-h 'mancher, der eine,'
u 'doch, nun, aber/ OE. pus 'thus, so/ etc.

307

76 FRANCIS A. WOOD

100. OE. *rohhe, reohhe 'a fish' (-eo-?), MDu. rochche, roche,
rochghe, rogghe 'roach' (sea-fish), MLG. roche, ruche idem, NE.
rough (FA£) 'rauh,' implying OE. *ruhh, Germ. *ruhwa-n- : OE. ruh
f shaggy, hairy, rough,' ryhce, rye, reowe 'blanket, rug,' OLG. rugi,
ruwi 'rauhes Fell,' OHG. ruh 'haaricht, struppig,' NHG. ranch
'mit Haaren, Federn, Stacheln bewachsen,' rauchware 'Pelzware/
pre-Germ. *ruquo- 'rough, broken,' *ruq- 'pull, tear, break': Lat.
runco 'pull out, weed,' Gr. pvKaprj 'plane,' Skt. luncdti 'rauft,
rauft aus, rupft, enthiilst,' ruk§dh 'rauh,' etc. For meaning com-
pare Lat. rumpoiLith. rupas 'rauh, hockerig, holprig.'

GERM, -gu-, -gw-:-gg-

101. OE. mcecgas 'boys/ Germ. *magwos : nom. magu, Goth.
magus (cf. Kluge Pauls Grdr., I2, 379; Biilbring, Ae. El, § 541).
Unfortunately this is not conclusive, since mcecg- may rather repre-
sent WGerm. *magj-, which would regularly occur in the loc. sing,
and the nom. plur. :Germ. *magiwi; *magiwiz, OHG. suniu, later
suni; Goth, mag jus, sunjus, OHG. suni.

102. ME. schoggen, 'shake, agitate,' Norw. dial, skygg 'scheu,
furchtsam,' Germ. *skugwia-, Swed. skygga 'scheu werden':MHG.
schiuhen, schiuwen ' verscheuchen' (cf. Fick, III,4 467). Cf. No. 35.

103. OE. raggig 'shaggy,' NE. rag, ragged, ON. rogg, roggr
'long coarse wool,' *ragwo-, -wa-:OE. ragu 'lichen,' OLG. raginna
'long hair, saetas,' MDu. raegh 'cobweb,' Skt. ragand 'Strick,
Riemen, Ztigel, Gurt,' ragmih 'Strang, Riemen, Ziigel, Messchnur,
Strahl.' Compare the root *reg- in ON. rekende, OE. racente, OHG.
rahhinza 'chain, fetter,' ON. rakke, OE. racca 'cord forming part of
rigging of ship/

104. ME. roggen 'rock, move back and forth,' Icel. rugga 'rock,
roll,' rugg 'a rocking, rolling,' rugga 'a rocking cradle,' Germ. *rugw-:
MLG. rogen 'regen, riihren, bewegen, erregen,' Icel. rugl 'confusion,
disorder,' rugla ' confuse ': ME. rokken 'rock,' No. 34.

105. NE. prog ' a poke, prod ; a pointed instrument for poking or
prodding,' verb 'poke, prod; poke about, prowl,' Germ. *prugg-,
*prugw-, pre-Germ. *brghu-:Gr. fipaxvs 'small, short,' EFris.
prakken 'pressen.' Cf. No. 38.

FRANCIS A. WOOD
UNIVERSITY OP CHICAGO

308

HEINE'S RETURN TO GOD

Recantation has been the fate of many ultra-free thinkers. In
his renunciation of paganism and his return to God, Heinrich Heine
finds himself in illustrious company. Brentano, Tolstoy, Wilde,
Strindberg — to mention only a few — experienced the struggle and
the bitterness of a similar facing-about, when their philosophy of
life was put under the strain of an unexpected test.

Involuntarily one is apt to refer to these cases as instances of
conversion. The term is convenient, and no psychology of conver-
sion could afford to neglect the lives of these men in studying the
fundamental laws of the psychic life. Yet it must be remembered
that, on the whole, theology has had an undisputed monopoly of
this term and that psychology must hesitate to use it so long as it is
not freed from some of its most clinging associations. Thus con-
version is regarded by theology as essentially a new attitude of mind
prompted by an act of divine grace — accordingly as something
imposed from without rather than prepared by slow, invisible
growth from within,1 whereas science must necessarily discard any
such mystical factor in its analyses. The frequent "suddenness"
of conversion, therefore, becomes only an apparent suddenness.
Furthermore, conversion customarily signifies the acceptance of a
more or less definite religious orthodoxy, and its genuineness is
attested by an overwhelming sense of sin.

As regards Heine, therefore, at any rate, discretion forbids the
use of the term "conversion," inasmuch as his change of philosophy
was neither sudden, nor in the direction of any religious orthodoxy,
nor accompanied by any marked sense of sin.

To turn from the slippery ground of terms to the rock bottom
of facts, however, the fundamental veering-about of Heine on the
basic question of eternal values, during the last decade of his life,
is an indisputable fact. It is a fact despite the slip-shod haste of

1 It is, of course, beyond the scope of this paper to touch upon the dilemma created
for theology by the interaction between God's arbitrary grace and a "free will" on the
part of man.
309] 77 [ MODERN PHILOLOGY, October, 1920

78 HERMANN J. WEIGAND

still occasionally recurring denials which pretend to see in Heine's
recantation of paganism simply a last gigantic hoax and mystification
of the public.1 Such denials come from two classes of people: from
those who have never examined the data first-hand; and from those
who are incapable of approaching any complex psychological ques-
tion with an open mind.

Avoiding controversy, I shall in the course of this paper (1) touch
upon the chief data establishing Heine's mental transformation as a
fact; (2) show in some detail the nature of Heine's new attitude;
and (3) attempt the more difficult task of analyzing the motives
which prompted Heine's renunciation of his past.

The first signs of a religious crisis preparing itself in Heine occur
in 1845 — that memorable year which marked the beginning of
Heine's bitter struggle with his family over the legacy he claimed
from his deceased uncle Solomon, and marked also the beginning of
the general paralysis which ended in his death.2 A letter bearing
the date of October 31, addressed to his friend and publisher, Campe,
shows that Heine was already at that time aware of a change going
on within him and that he struggled against it. With prophetic
intuition he says: "Em tieferer Ernst, ein unklarer Ungestiim hat
mich ergriffen, der vielleicht eigentumlich furchtbare Ausbriiche
gestattet in Prosa und Versen — aber das ist doch nicht was mir
ziemt und was ich wollte." Three years later this change had
progressed far enough for Heine to substitute "God" for "the gods"
in his letters. The substance of this change from an aesthetic
polytheism to a more sober deism is not altered by the frivolous tone
with which Heine remarks apropos of the revolutionary turmoil of
1848: "Das ist Universalanarchie, Weltkuddelmuddel, sichtbar

1 Johannes Scherr, for instance: "Heine hat den bekannten Bekehrungswitz im
Romanzero losgelassen," Allg. Gesch. d. Lit. (1880), II, 380.

* An earlier religious crisis of brief duration occurred in 1836, when Heine experi-
enced a sharp reaction against the life of sensuous enjoyment which he had begun to
lead with the beautiful charmer who later became his wife. The struggle within his
soul between his "Hellenic" doctrines of enjoyment and his longings for a crown of
thorns is vividly depicted in a letter to the Princess Belgiojoso (October 30, 1836) and
in his famous Tannhauser poem. This time, however, in reality, as in the poem, Hellen-
ism came off triumphant and his " Nazarene" longings were forgotten in a continued whirl
of pleasure.

310

HEINE'S RETURN TO GOD 79

gewordener Gotteswahnsinn ! Der Alte muss eingesperrt werden,
wenn das so fortgeht. Das haben die Atheisten verschuldet, die
ihn toll geargert" (letter to Campe, July 9, 1848). Nor is it altered
by the fact that Heine seems averse to blaming the gods for his
sufferings, rather singling out God for the purpose: "Nie haben die
Gotter, oder vielmehr der liebe Gott (wie ich jetzt zu sagen pflege),
einen Menschen arger heimgesucht" (letter to Campe, April 30,
1849). Yet sporadic passages from private letters like these would
not carry the force of conviction, were they not supplemented by
public declarations on Heine's part beginning with 1849. In an
open letter of that year he makes this frank confession :

Unterdessen, ich will es freimiitig gestehen, ist eine grosse Umwandlung
mit mir vorgegangen: ich bin kein gottlicher Bipede mehr; ich bin nicht
mehr der "freieste Deutsche nach Goethe," wie mich Huge in gesiindern
Tagen genannt hat; ich bin nicht mehr der grosse Heide Nr. II, den man
mit dem weinlaubumkranzten Dionysus verglich, wahrend man meinem
Kollegen Nr. I den Titel eines grossherzoglichen weimar'schen Jupiter
erteilte; ich bin kein lebensfreudiger, etwas wohlbeleibter Hellene mehr,
der auf triibsinnige Nazarener herablachelte — ich bin jetzt nur ein armer
totkranker Jude, ein abgezehrtes Bild des Jammers, ein ungliicklicher
Mensch [VII, 537-38].1

Two years later followed Heine's famous Nachwort zum Roman-
zero, in which he bade a touching farewell to his beloved idols and
unequivocally stated that he had made his peace with God. He
had not entered the fold of any church nor embraced any particular
set of dogmas, he declared, to guard against any misunderstanding;
he had simply returned from the veiled atheism of the Hegelians to
the faith in a personal God — a God with a will, and a God with the
power to help (I, 485 ff.).

From this time forth not only Heine's personal letters but all his
literary writings up to his death repeat and emphasize the change
that had taken place within him. Thus his will, as drawn up in
1851, states that four years previously he had renounced all philo-
sophic pride and returned to religious ideas and feelings and that he
was prepared to die a believer in an only God, the eternal creator
of the world whose mercy he implored for his immortal soul (VII,
520). Similarly his Preface in 1852 to the new edition of his Religion

i This and all subsequent quotations are based on Elster's edition.

311

80 HERMANN J. WEIGAND

and Philosophy in Germany is a confession that everything in that
book pertaining to God was as false as it was thoughtlessly uttered
(IV, 156), a repudiation which he reiterates and enlarges upon in his
Gestandnisse, written the year following (VI, 41 ff, 50, 53, 70, etc.).
Finally, the prefatory remarks to his Memoirs — Heine's last essay in
prose — leave no doubt that an earlier version of this work had to
be destroyed by the author, partly owing to religious scruples (VII,
522, 458).

The seriousness of any one of the passages alluded to, individually
considered, might indeed be questioned by a skeptical reader, wont
to look in Heine's writings only for wit, even at his own expense.
Taken as a whole, however, and in connection with the poetry of
the same period which I have not even touched upon for want of
space, they must convince any open-minded reader of the genuine-
ness of Heine's return to God. This conviction will be sustained in
examining Heine's attitude toward his newly found God and toward
religion in general.

Heine was well aware that his religious orientation after 1848
involved a sweeping repudiation of his past teachings and profes-
sions, and he faced this repudiation with the utmost frankness.
Instead of trying to make capital out of the religious mantle with
which he had been wont in the early thirties to drape his gospel of
enjoyment, he discarded all ornamental trappings and admitted
that what he had taught and practiced had amounted to atheism,
similar to a defendant at the bar who hopes to lighten his sentence
by a clean confession. Rather than resort to denial, he sought to
base his plea for indulgence on extenuating circumstances. Heine
reminded the reader of his Confessions — and God, by implication —
that as a child he had been exposed to the doctrines of French
eighteenth-century materialism (VI, 69), and that in later life he
had been seduced by the authority attaching to the Hegelian school.
He had never been an abstract thinker; he had simply repeated
what the leaders of the school taught him as true; and he admitted
that belief in Hegelianism had come to him so naturally because it
flattered his vanity to regard himself as an autonomous God, the

312

HEINE'S RETURN TO GOD 81

source of all authority and moral law (VI, 48). Thus he regarded
his former atheism in the light of a serious error rather than of a sin.
He experienced nothing resembling a crushing sense of guilt calling
for expiation and atonement.

In accord with this mental attitude is the marvelous equanimity
with which Heine endured his terrible sufferings. While at times
his agony became so acute that he could feel nothing but the divine
hand smiting him in blind wrath, he preferred in moments of lesser
tension to regard his tortures not as punishment but rather as a
divine visitation serving for his further purification. After, as
before, he loved to contemplate his past life with serenity and satis-
faction; to mirror his soul and behold it beautiful and pure, marred
only by scars but not disfigured by blemishes. "Die Hiille fallt
ab von der Seele, und du kannst sie betrachten in ihrer schonen
Nacktheit. Da sind keine Flecken, nur Wunden" (VII, 459). l

Thus, to the last, Heine was enamored of his own fair image.
In his youth he had sensed this sweet odor of self-adoration by con-
juring up in his dreams and his poems the vampire maid of ghostly
beauty, the mermaid and the nymph, who stole to his couch to
cover him, passively submitting, with passionate caresses. The
denial of the love he craved from his cousin Amalie had thrown him
into paroxysms of rage, threatening suicide. In later life he had
vaunted as none other the sweet incense of flattery. He never
wavered in his affection for his mother, who must have been the
first to awaken these stirrings in his bosom. And now, when the
end was in sight, when less deeply rooted traits of his, nature gave
way under the impetus of unforseen attack, this self-love main-
tained itself in his relation to his newly found God.

The God with whose company Heine beguiled the long years of
slow torture had to respond above all to Heine's desire to be loved.

i From numerous passages in a similar vein, I quote the following from his letters:

"Ja, ich bin sehr korperkrank, aber die Seele hat wenig gelitten; eine mtide Blume,
ist sie em bischen gebeugt, aber keineswegs welk, und sie wurzelt noch fest in der Wahrheit
und Liebe" (to Varnhagen, January 3, 1846).

"Das holdselige Bewusstsein, ein schones Leben gefuhrt zu haben, erfiillt meine
Seele selbst in dieser kummervollen Zeit; wird mich auch hoffentlich in der letzten
Stunde bis an den weissen Abgrund begleiten" (to Campe, September 1, 1846).

"Mein Korper leidet grosse Qual, aber meine Seele ist ruhig wie ein Spiegel und
hat manchmal auch noch ihre schonen Sonnenaufgange und Sonnenuntergange" (to
Campe, December 14, 1852).

313

82 HERMANN J. WEIGAND

God had to be conceived as a loving and indulgent father. Heine
could not but regard himself as a favorite child of God's — a child
whose very failings, though they required punishment, could not
help giving pleasure to the Almighty; a child whose word carried
weight with his heavenly father, and whose intercession for his
fellow-mortals would be given benevolent consideration by the
Creator.1

Around this central nucleus Heine built up his conception of
God. He endowed his God with the attributes of omnipotence,
omniscience, wisdom, justice, and mercy which the deists had left
him, after stripping him of his more concrete human qualities; but
he added a new attribute with which neither the stern English
deists nor the flippant Voltaire had thought of clothing him: a
sense of humor. God was enthroned by Heine as a heavenly Aris-
tophanes who found intense enjoyment in the wit of his small human
replica in Paris, who listened to the earthly poet's mellifluous verses
with evident pleasure, and who treated even an occasional quip at
his own expense with good-natured tolerance. But at the same
time, in order not to let his favorite son forget his superior authority,
he would play now and then one of his own cruelly practical jokes at
the earthly joker's expense, so as to make him remember that he
could be other things also besides a comedian (VI, 73).

Feuerbach's famous remark, according to which man has created
God after his own image, holds particularly true of so subjective a
poet as Heine. Its truth is borne out in the manner of the relations
which Heine maintained with his God; in the tone of their social
intercourse — speaking figuratively and yet not too figuratively.
This tone, as to be expected, varies with the poet's mood of the
moment. At times Heine is but the poor mortal, speaking humbly
to the unfathomably superior Creator. But more often supplication,
prayer, or reverence are replaced by a tone of intimate familiarity.
God then divests himself of his divine robes of state, as it were. He
allows Heine to feel himself on a pretended level with him. The

1 Take, for example, the following: "Je te salue, cher lecteur, et je prie Dieu qu' il
t'aie dans sa sainte et digne garde" (Prgface to the Polmes et LSgendes [1855], I, 499).
Incidentally, omitting the salutation, these words used to constitute the customary
close of letters of royalty. It is commonly found, for instance, in the letters of Frederick
the Great.

314

HEINE'S RETURN TO GOD

solemn audience gives way to familiar conversation on a level of
equality. At such moments, Heine, in a bantering tone, lets the
Lord know that he is quite willing to put up with the sinfulness of
the world a little longer and enjoy the status quo, provided the Lord
sees his way clear to granting him a little better health and a trifle
more money (Zum Lazarus, 11; II, 97-98). Or he permits himself
to point out to the Lord a certain inconsistency in creating a humor-
ous poet such as he and then ruining his mood (Miserere, II, 89).
Then, again, the injustice which he sees enthroned in the world
drives him to the verge of positive blasphemy:

Warum schleppt sich blutend, elend,
Unter Kreuzlast der Gerechte,
Wahrend gliicklich als ein Sieger
Trabt auf hohem Ross der Schlechte ?

Woran liegt die Schuld ? 1st etwa
Unser Herr nicht ganz allmachtig ?
Oder treibt er selbst den Unf ug ?
Ach, das ware niedertrachtig.

[Zum Lazarus, I, II, 92.]

But such outbursts find their reaction in cries like :
Ertrage die Schickung und versuch
Gelinde zu flennen, zu beten.

[Zum Lazarus 2, II, 92.]

Familiarity, banter, and criticism bordering on blasphemy were
in the make-up of Heine's intercourse with his God. He felt no
pangs on their account, even if at times his expression shot beyond
the mark set by the respect due an almighty creator. Such freedom
of expression constituted the inalienable right of the poet, and he
would have resented any curtailment of it as much as any free
citizen resents the limitation of frank criticism and daring caricature
of the government. He would have resented it the more, as he
felt that he was playing the game fair. Ever since the time of his
return to God he had carefully refrained from publishing anything
that in his opinion would tend to undermine the authority of God
as such. In loyalty to his new religious viewpoint he had consigned
his memoirs to the flames. He had suppressed countless atheistic
witticisms, and he had sacrificed priceless gems of poetry.1 Such

1 VI, 51; I, 485; letters to Campe of June 1, 1849, and June 1, 1850, etc.

315

84 HERMANN J. WEIGAND

proofs of loyalty established a claim for divine indulgence, even if
the poet's language became a trifle too bold or his anthropomor-
phization of the Creator a trifle too grotesque.

The poem Himmelfahrt (II, 217) is a case in point, illustrating
the liberties Heine permitted himself when his poetic fancy attached
itself to the figure of the Creator. He burlesques St. Peter, the
heavenly gatekeeper (following in this case the precedent of the Ger-
man folk legend); he burlesques the heavenly atmosphere; he bur-
lesques the great Lord himself, for whose divine benefit the heavenly
establishment is being run. The tolerant good humor of St. Peter,
based on the reflection that it happens to be his birthday when Heine
knocks at the gate; St. Peter's careful instructions to the newcomer
to be circumspect about his conduct, to suppress feelings of fatigue
or boredom at any cost, and to be even a trifle overdemonstrative
in his relations to the Lord, inasmuch as even His Divine Self liked
a touch of flattery now and then; and lastly St. Peter's sub rosa
invitation to Heine for an occasional game of cards — these are
phantasies that bespeak the sweetest naive humor, without a touch
of malice or blasphemy. Poems like Himmelfahrt merely show that
God had entered not only Heine's mind as a concept but his imagina-
tion as well; that God had assumed the character of a concrete per-
sonality whose presence brought consolation and entertainment to
the poet's sick bed. The danger of the reader's taking such fanciful
character delineations of the Creator too literally is, happily, not
very great, provided he remembers that Heine was at all times a
poet and at the same time a great deal of a child, practicing a child's
naivete and enjoying its license. But it is well to recall Heine's own
comment on his return to God, as set forth in a letter to Georg
Weerth dated November 5, 1851 :

Es freut mich, dass Ihnen meine Vorrede (zum Romanzero) gefallen
hat; leider habe ich weder Zeit noch Stimmung gehabt, darin auszusprechen,
was ich eben dartun wollte, namlich, dass ich als Dichter sterbe, der weder
Religion noch Philosophic braucht und mit beiden nichts zu schaffen hat.
Der Dichter versteht sehr gut das symbolische Idiom der Religion und das
abstrakte Verstandeskauderwelsch der Philosophic, aber weder die Herren
der Religion noch die der Philosophic werden jemals den Dichter verstehen,
dessen Sprache ihnen immer spanisch vorkommen wird, wie dem Massmann
das Latein. Durch diese linguistische Unkenntnis geschah es, dass diese
und jene Herren sich einbildeten, ich sei ein Betbruder geworden.

316

HEINE'S RETURN TO GOD 85

It must be added, on the other hand, that this letter understates
the positive character of the change that was proceeding in Heine;
for it does not allude to his recasting of ethical values. It does not
mention the fact that the philosophy of enjoyment, to the proclama-
tion of which Heine had seemed foreordained, was slowly but surely
being replaced by a more austere morality.

Though less striking than his return to belief in God, Heine's
new ethical orientation is an even more significant factor in the
readjustment of his personality, face to face with approaching
dissolution.

In the Nachwort zum Romanzero (1851), Heine had bidden a
touching farewell to his beloved pagan gods. In Die Goiter im Exil
(1853), he bestowed a last fondly lingering look upon their beloved
company, most of all on Dionysus-Bacchus, whom he calls "der
Heiland der Sinnenlust" (VI, 83). In parting from them he had
also turned his back upon the life of enjoyment of which the gods
were to him concrete symbolical impersonations. He had been
forced to take farewell of it personally, because his body had wasted
to a mere shadow; but, now that he saw it only from afar, its glamor
also waned, and he saw the antithesis between the life of sense and
the life of the spirit, which he had been wont to state in the extreme
form of antinomy, in a new light. The two polar opposites of
sensualism and spiritualism, or Hellenism and Nazarenism, as he
renamed them after 1836, remained, for the most part, as far apart
as ever, but his thought no longer spontaneously gravitated to the
Hellenic pole. The spiritual dignity of morality loomed in a new
light, and Heine's Gestdndnisse reach their climax in the statement,
"Gutsein ist besser denn Schonheit" (VI, 60).

Even attempts to reconcile opposites which had heretofore
seemed irreconcilable are not lacking. Thus the beautiful frag-
ment Bimini speaks of two divine messages brought from Byzantium
(the Renaissance), and from Egypt (the Bible) :

Buch der Schonheit heisst das eine,
Buch der Wahrheit heisst das andre.

Beide aber hat Gott selber
Abgefasst in zwei verschiednen
Himmelssprachen, und er schrieb sie,
Wie wir glauben, eigenhandig [II, 126].
317

86 HERMANN J. WEIGAND

But it was too late for Heine to effect any real synthesis. In his
swan song, the poem entitled Fur die Mouche, the antithesis is again
as glaring as ever:

Die Gegensatze sind hier grell gepaart,

Des Griechen Lustsinn und der Gottgedanke

Judaas! [II, 47].

And from the depths of his soul comes the despairing outcry:
0, dieser Streit wird enden nimmermehr,
Stets wird die Wahrheit hadern mit dem Schonen,
Stets wird geschieden sein der Menschheit Heer
In zwei Partein: Barbaren und Hellenen [II, 49].

The import of Heine's change of front toward morality becomes
clear in the light of the peculiar setting in which it makes its appear-
ance. Heine's new valuation of morality emerges simultaneously
with the reawakening of his love for his race. "Meine Vorliebe fur
Hellas hat .... abgenommen," his thought runs in his Confes-
sions. "Ich sehe jetzt, die Griechen waren nur schone Jiinglinge,
die Juden waren aber immer Manner, nicht bloss ehemals, sondern
bis auf den heutigen Tag, trotz achtzehn Jahrhunderten der Verfolg-
ung und des Elends" (VI, 55).

In his youth Heine had shown an active interest in the history
of Judaism. For a time he had been active as a member of the
Berlin group which was working toward the end of raising the cul-
tural level of their race which had so long been kept outside the pale
of European civilization. From the interest in the fate of the Jews
during the Middle Ages had sprung his novel Der Rabbi von Bacha-
rach, which he left unfinished when his interest in Judaism began to
wane under the pressure of other tasks and when the formulation of
distinctly cosmopolitan and humanitarian ideals alienated him from
the problem of Judaism as such. In the course of time his " Hellenic "
philosophy of enjoyment had forced him into a state of active hostility
against Judaism as a Weltanschauung. But now, with the collapse
of his Hellenism and the enforced leisure of the sick bed his old
interest in the people of his race resurged and grew in intensity to
passionate love.1

1 Signs of Heine's returning love for Judaism are not lacking even earlier. In the
wild-huntsman's vision of Atta Troll (1842), the Jewess Herodias carries the prize before
the romantic "Fee Abunde" and the Greek Diana (II, 401).

318

HEINE'S RETURN TO GOD 87

Thus, beginning with the Romanzero, Judaism becomes the
central theme of his poetry. Biblical episodes are treated with a
mastery of language and a vividness of outline which bespeak the
intensity with which Heine recreated the past of his race (Das
goldne Kalb; Konig David; Salomo). The culture of medieval
Spanish Judaism is immortalized in Jehuda ben Halevy; and its
gloomy counterpart, ferocious orthodoxy, is depicted with a mixture
of railing humor and mordant irony in the famous Disputation. The
beauty and the tragedy of modern Judaism, again, find their finest
expression in Der Apollogott and Prinzessin Sabbath.

Towering in Heine's mind, however, above all the Jewish charac-
ters that fired his imagination was the great prophet Moses. The
more Heine read the Bible during his years of solitude, the more
was he overwhelmed by the grandeur of the Moses of the Pentateuch.
"Welche Riesengestalt!" he exclaims in his Confessions. "Wie
klein erscheint der Sinai, wenn der Moses darauf steht! Dieser
Berg ist nur das Postament, worauf die Fiisse des Mannes stehen,
dessen Haupt in den Himmel hineinragt, wo er mit Gott spricht"
(VI, 54 ff.). He sees in Moses the genius who gave the world a
God; the wise organizer who welded tribes of nomads into a nation.
The vastness of the task which Moses conceived and carried out
appealed to Heine as a monumental work of art; he extolled Moses
as a supreme artist, a builder of human pyramids and human obelisks
(VI, 55). At the same time Moses appeared to him a far-seeing
guardian of liberty, whose agrarian laws should serve as models to
future generations. He calls him a practical socialist and a great
emancipator (VI, 61). Thus Heine's penchant for hero-worship
leads him to include Moses in the ranks of his supermen. Goethe,
Napoleon, and at one time Hegel are the only others whose greatness
he feels to be incommensurable to human standards. But Moses
towers supreme, when Heine surveys his gallery of heroes:

Einer nur, ein einz'ger Held
Gab uns mehr und gab uns Bessres
Als Kolumbus, das ist jener,
Der uns einen Gott gegeben.

Sein Herr Vater, der hiess Amram,
Seine Mutter hiess Jochebeth,
319

88 HERMANN J. WEIGAND

Und er selber, Moses heisst er,
Und er 1st mein bester Heros.

[Vitzliputzli, I, 374 ft'.]

So Heine's return to God is intimately bound up with his return
to racial consciousness. The Jews have become for him the people
with a predestined mission. They are the nation that gave the
world a God and a moral law (VI, 56), and guarded their treasure
by preserving the Bible through centuries of persecution (VI, 58).
And despite the caricatures of the idea of Judaism which Heine
finds in Scotland, Denmark, North Germany, and the United States,
despite the somber gray of a puritanism that guards the letter
more than the spirit, he is convinced that the morality of ancient
Judaism will remain in the face of change as the genuine, the
imperishable and the true (VI, 60).

Love of one's neighbor and purity of spirit constitute in part the
morality of Judaism, as Heine conceived it (VI, 59). In view of
the fact, however, that Heine's former Hellenism had made sensuous
enjoyment the crucial point of issue, the essence of the morality of
Judaism is clearly set forth in the following paragraph :

Judaa erschien mir immer wie ein Stuck Occident, das sich mitten in
den Orient verloren. In der Tat, mit seinem spiritualistischen Glauben,
seinen strengen, keuschen, sogar asketischen Sitten, kurz mit seiner abstrak-
ten Innerlichkeit, bildete dieses Land und sein Volk immer den sonder-
barsten Gegensatz zu den Nachbarlandern und Nachbarvolkern, die den
iippig buntesten und briinstigsten Naturkulten huldigend, im bacchantischen
Sinnenjubel ihr Dasein verluderten. Israel sass fromm unter seinem
Feigenbaum und sang das Lob des unsichtbaren Gottes und tibte Tugend
und Gerechtigkeit, wahrend in den Tempeln von Babel, Ninive, Sidon und
Tyrus jene blutigen und unziichtigen Orgien gefeiert wurden, ob deren
Beschreibung uns noch jetzt das Haar sich straubt [VI, 61].

After the foregoing it is clear that there could be no question of
a rapprochement on Heine's part to any branch of the Christian
church. Heine protested against any such interpretation on numer-
ous occasions, at times in a grave, dignified way with a marked
show of courtesy toward both Catholicism and Lutheranism, and
at times with the impish smile that made him the enfant terrible of
the orthodox (VI, 56 f., 65 f.; VII, 519, etc.). However, quite
apart from dogma of any sort, Heine's new conception of morality

320

HEINE'S RETURN TO GOD 89

is not tinged with any specifically Christian elements. Heine made
no half-hearted attempts to love his enemies, as Christianity pre-
scribes. He hated them with a clean conscience, based on ample
Old Testament precedent. His remark in the Nachwort zum Roman-
zero to the effect that, since he was in need of God's mercy himself,
he had granted amnesty to all his enemies, constituted at best a pious
wish. It did not prevent him, at any rate, from including in the
Romanzero itself a poem entitled Vermdchtnis, in which he bequeathed
all his physical ailments to his enemies (I, 429). In one of his
posthumous poems he likewise makes over a varied assortment of
undesirable legacies to individuals and groups that had incurred his
wrath (Testament, II, 220), while a whole group of such poems heaps
maledictions on the heads of Karl Heine and his kin (II, 104-9).
Besides, one of his posthumous aphorisms leaves nothing to be desired
in the way of frankness:

Ich habe die friedlichste Gesinnung. Meine Wunsche sind: eine
bescheidene Hiitte, ein Strohdach, aber ein gutes Bett, gutes Essen, Milch
und Butter, sehr frisch, vor dem Fenster Blumen, vor der Tiir einige schone
Baume, und wenn der Hebe Gott mich ganz gliicklich machen will, lasst er
mich die Freude erleben, dass an diesen Baumen etwa sechs bis sieben
meiner Feinde aufgehangt werden. Mit geriihrtem Herzen werde ich ihnen
vor ihrem Tode alle Unbill verzeihen, die sie mir im Leben zugefiigt — ja,
man muss seinen Feinden verzeihen, aber nicht friiher, als bis sie gehangt
worden [VII, 400].

This frank, virile hatred is, however, not incompatible with a
large capacity for sympathy, such as we look for in vain during
Heine's days of prosperity. In this respect his own suffering has
taught him a lesson. Poems like Pomare, Sklavenschiff, Jammertal,
show a stirring of deep symapthy for the sick, the oppressed, and
the poor. To point out how Heine's sympathies during the years
of his decline incline more and more to the loser in the struggle
for survival would lead us too far afield. Suffice it to remember
Legras' happy characterization of the Romanzero as "le livre d'or
des vaincus."

A sketch of Heine's return to God and the morality of his fore-
fathers would not be complete without mention of Heine's attitude
toward the problem of survival after death. As a rule men "get

321

90 HERMANN J. WEIGAND

religion" at the approach of death. Fear of eternal punishment is
undoubtedly the motive underlying most conversions.

Speculations on immortality and resurrection, on heaven and
hell form a persistent topic of Heine's sick-bed musings. Occasion-
ally he professed a certain uneasiness in regard to the eternal flames.
Commenting on the haste with which he destroyed such poetic pro-
ductions as he felt would compromise him in the eyes of God, he
remarks: "Es ist besser, dass die Verse brennen, als der Versifex"
(I, 485; cf. VI, 51). In the same connection he admits that the
prospect of immortality has something very appealing to a poor
wretched mortal. With undisguised pleasure he notes that the
concept of God involves that of immortality as its generally accepted
corollary. Having developed the attributes of God after the manner
of the deists, he adds :

Die Unsterblichkeit der Seele, unsre Fortdauer nach dem Tode wird uns
alsdann gleichsam mit in den Kauf gegeben, wie der schone Markknochen,
den der Fleischer, wenn er mit seinen Kunden zufrieden ist, ihnen unent-
geltlich in den Korb schiebt. Ein solcher schoner Markknochen wird in
der franzosischen Kiichensprache "la re*jouissance" genannt, und man
kocht damit ganz vorziigliche Kraftbriihen, die fur einen armen schmach-
tenden Kranken sehr starkend und labend sind. Dass ich eine solche
re"jouissance nicht ablehnte und sie mir vielmehr mit Behagen zu Gemiite
fiihrte, wird jeder fiihlende Mensch billigen [I, 486].

In the same vein his poem Fromme Warnung paints the delights
of heaven as consisting of quiet, soft slippers and beautiful music
(I, 420). Some of the other poems of the Romanzero, however,
take a less optimistic view of future prospects. In Ruckschau the
thought of again meeting his "Christian brothers " in the beyond
fills him with disgust (I, 416). In Auferstehung he rebels against
the summary justice of the Supreme Court of the Day of Judgment
that would separate men into sheep and goats according to an
altogether too convenient formula (I, 417). In Der Abgekiihlte,
again, the prospect of resurrection appears as a rather remote com-
pensation for the lack of joy and comfort here below (I, 420). This
mood seems to have gained the upper hand as the years wore on
and the calls of death became more frequent and insistent. Then
the thought of the separation of body and soul loomed as something

322

HEINE'S RETURN TO GOD 91

altogether terrible, as in the dialogue between body and soul, where
the soul says:

Weh mir! jetzt soil ich gleichsam nackt,

Ganz ohne Korper, ganz abstrakt,

Hinlungern in ein sePges Nichts

Dort oben in dem Reich des Lichts,

In jenen kalten Himmelshallen,

Wo schweigend die Ewigkeiten wallen

Und mich angahnen — sie klappern dabei

Langweilig mit ihren Pantoffeln von Blei.

O, das ist grauenhaft, o bleib,

Bleib bei mir, du geliebter Leib! [II, 91].

To dispel such thoughts Heine had recourse to phantasies like the
dialogue with St. Peter at the gate of heaven.

Heine's last word on immortality seems to be contained in one
of the poems addressed to his Mouche. Die Wahlverlobten ends with
renunciation of any hope of the continuance of individual existence
and tries to derive comfort from the immortality of the poet's works:

.... Wir scheiden heut

Auf immerdar. Kein Wiedersehn

Gibt es fur uns in Himmelshohn.

Die Schonheit ist dem Staub verfallen,

Du wirst zerstieben, wirst verhallen.

Viel anders ist es mit Poeten;

Die kann der Tod nicht ganzlich toten.

Uns trifft nicht weltliche Vernichtung,

Wir leben fort im Land der Dichtung,

In Avalun, dem Feenreiche —

Leb wohl auf ewig, schone Leiche! [II, 45]. *

To be sure, Heine's last letter to his mother (December 30,
1855) expresses the confident hope of reunion, but it is only neces-
sary to recall the fictions to which Heine persistently resorted to
conceal from his mother the gravity of his illness, in order to realize
that such testimony cannot carry any great weight.

Generally speaking, one cannot venture to say anything very
definite about Heine's mental world during the months which marked
the last act of the drama of his sufferings. He was too exhausted

1 But to realize how bitterly Heine felt the inadequacy of such an immortality, one
has only to read poems like Der Scheidende (II, 109) and Epilog (II, 110).

323

92 HERMANN J. WEIGAND

with pain and too benumbed through the huge doses of morphine
which his condition required to care much about the future one
way or the other. His apathy was general except for the hope
that the end would come. He was already a corpse save for a
feeble spark of life which put its patience to a last test by its long
protracted glow.

Erstorben ist in meiner Brust

Jedwede weltlich eitle Lust,

Schier ist auch mir erstorben drin

Der Hass des Schlechten, sogar der Sinn

Fiir eigne wie fur fremde Not — •

Und in mir lebt nur noch der Tod! [II, 109].

As a picture of Heine's inner world since 1848 this sketch is
altogether fragmentary, confining itself, as it does, to studying the
positive religious transformation that took place in him. A rounded-
out picture of Heine's last years would perforce stress in addition
both his somber pessimism and his frequent passionate longing for
the wild joys of the senses that had ceased to function. Neither his
pessimism nor his longings can be logically reconciled with his
religious rebirth. They are croppings out of his old self which
would not die while there was still breath in his body. Heine
remained to the last a complex personality, torn between mutually
incompatible desires; a play of cross-currents which he knew not
how to unite as tributaries in a life of planful, harmonious purpose.

Ill

What were the motives which prompted Heine's renunciation of
his paganism and his return to God ?

In more than one way Heine occupies a unique position among
German poets. To a degree not found in any other poet, Heine's pro-
ductions gravitate about his own personality. Almost every line that
he wrote invites psychological analysis, and almost every line
furnishes data for such analysis. Despite the complexity of Heine's
personality, it becomes a grateful and fascinating task to seek in
Heine, behind the bundle of logical contradictions with which his
life abounds, the psychological unity in which they had their source.
Without any apprehension, therefore, of having to resort to vague

324

HEINE'S RETURN TO GOD 93

generalities or of getting lost in blind alleys, one may attempt to
retrace the psychological paths which led Heine back to God and
the morality of his forefathers.

Wish is said to be the father of thought; so it is well to examine,
first of all, the considerations which made a world ruled over by an
old-fashioned God an acceptable place of abode for Heine, after he
had pronounced his de facto recognition of God. In moods of grave
seriousness mingled with melancholy mirth Heine dwelt with pleasure
on the advantages which he derived from the existence of an omnipo-
tent creator, enthroned in heaven. Racked by tortures which could
end only with death, shut out from the gay life of the humming
metropolis, condemned to a loneliness even more terrible than his
sufferings, he derived consolation from the idea that there was a
God to whose ear he had access at every moment; that there was
someone whom he could talk and pray to; someone whom he could
flatter, cajole, entertain, or abuse according to his mood of the
moment; someone of whose attention and appreciation he could
always feel certain. To quote his own words:

In diesem Zustande ist es eine wahre Wohltat fur mich, dass es jemand
im Himmel gibt, dem ich bestandig die Litanei meiner Leiden vorwimmern
kann, besonders nach Mitternacht, wenn Mathilde sich zur Ruhe begeben,
die sie oft sehr notig hat [VI, 50].

Then he could confide to the Lord his own troubles and his worries
as to what should become of his wife, when he could no longer guard
her steps nor provide for her wants. To such tender solicitude for
Mathilde's material and moral welfare in that wolves' den, Paris
(Babylonische Sorgen, II, 43) — a solicitude which largely served as a
cover for tormenting jealousy — such poems as the touching Ich war,
0 Lamm, als Hirt bestellt owe their being (II, 42). It was also a
relief to him, as he jestingly remarks, to be able to intrust his affairs
to a heavenly attorney who, thanks to his omniscience, would doubt-
less be able to manage them much better than he had ever been able
to do (VI, 50).

From quite another angle, besides, Heine's return to God had
much in its favor. Formerly the profession of atheistic doctrines
had been a characteristic of the "intelligentsia." A coterie of
aristocrats of the intellect had promulgated them in an abstruse

325

94 HERMANN J. WEIGAND

philosophical language, debarring the comprehension of the populace.
But in the course of time the situation had shifted. Thanks to
Karl Marx, atheism had now — especially since 1848 — become the
creed of the workman. It was no longer exclusive, nor a sign of
distinction. With this turn of affairs,, atheism lost its attraction for
Heine. Expressing his realization of this change with startling
candor, he remarks:

Als der Atheismus anfing, sehr stark nach Kase, Branntwein und Tabak
zu stinken: da gingen mir plotzlich die Augen auf, und was ich nicht durch
meinen Verstand begriffen hatte, das begriff ich jetzt durch den Geruchs-
sinn, durch das Missbehagen des Ekels, und mit meinem Atheismus hatte
es, gottlob! ein Ende [VI, 42].

To the aid of this aesthetic aversion to mingling with the common
herd — intellectually no less than physically — there came also a
feeling of anxiety as to the future, when Heine observed the program
of communism marching under the banner of atheism. When com-
munism was in its infancy, Heine had helped to proclaim its future
mission in pealing verse.1 Now, however, when the realization of
its program no longer seemed altogether Utopian, he began to look
with fear upon the fledgling which he had helped to hatch. Hasten-
ing to protest that his misgivings had nothing in common with those
of the capitalist who fears for his dividends, he adds :

Mich beklemmt vielmehr die geheime Angst des Kiinstlers und des
Gelehrten, die wir unsre ganze moderne Zivilisation, die muhselige Errungen-
schaft so vieler Jahrhunderte, die Frucht der edelsten Arbeiten unsrer
Vorganger, durch den Sieg des Kommunismus bedroht sehen [VI, 42].

And with a flash of insight which illuminates the fundamental nature
of his agitation for political democracy, he continues:

Wir wollen gern fur das Volk uns opfern, denn Selbstaufopferung gehort
zu unsern raffiniertesten Geniissen — die Emanzipation des Volkes war die
grosse Aufgabe unseres Lebens, und wir haben dafiir gerungen und namen-
loses Elend ertragen in der Heimat wie im Exile — aber die reinliche, sensi-
tive Natur des Dichters straubt sich gegen jede personlich nahe Beriihrung
mit dem Volke, und noch mehr schrecken wir zusammen bei dem Gedanken
an seine Liebkosungen, vor denen uns Gott bewahre [VI, 42].

Heine had taken pride in the role of a political spokesman, for-
mulating the aspirations of the people. Condescending to lead, he

1 Cf. Deutschland, ein Wintermdrchen, II, 431-33.

326

HEINE'S RETURN TO GOD

had enjoyed this form of " self-sacrifice," as he calls it. But now
that the people knew what they wanted, the day of such leaders
was over. When the one-time leaders were summoned to fall in
line and march with the rest, Heine withdrew. He had not meant
equality to be taken so literally. He suddenly saw that the aspira-
tions of the new generation, their discipline, their unerring Zielbe-
wusstsein left no room for his own romantic subjectivism. He would
not follow them; they paid no heed to him. And suddenly he
became aware that the tables were turned, that atheism was now
the vogue of the day, and that it was again a sign of distinction to
render homage to the God who had been deposed by the noisy
crowd. His newly found faith restored to Heine that sense of
superiority, that isolation of genius which he craved from the depths
of his nature. Now he did not feel as one left behind in the march
of progress. He felt as one on a peak whose eye reaches far beyond
the goal of the noisy marchers below.

The consolation, the security and the entertainment that Heine
felt in communing with his God; the feeling of aristocratic isolation
which his renunciation of atheism involved — one will do well to
regard these rather as benefits resulting from Heine's return to God
than as motives prompting that return. Such they were certainly
in Heine's own estimation; for he leaves no doubt as to what he
regarded as the chief factor prompting his spiritual transformation.
Repudiating anything that savored of conversion by miracle, he
attributes his change of viewpoint solely to the Bible :

In der Tat, weder eine Vision, noch eine seraphitische Verziickung,
noch eine Stimme vom Himmel, auch kein merkwurdiger Traum oder sonst
ein Wunderspuk brachte mich auf den Weg des Heils, und ich verdanke
meine Erleuchtung ganz einfach der Lektiire eines Buches. Eines Buches ?
Ja, und es ist ein altes, schlichtes Buch, bescheiden wie die Natur, auch
natiirlich wie diese; ein Buch, das werkeltagig und anspruchslos aussieht
wie die Sonne, die uns warmt, wie das Brot, das uns nahrt; ein Buch, das
so traulich, so segnend gtitig uns anblickt wie eine alte Grossmutter, die auch
taglich in dem Buche liest, mit den lieben, bebenden Lippen und mit der
Brille auf der Nase — und dieses Buch heisst auch ganz kurzweg das Buch,
die Bibel [Preface to the second edition of Religion and Philosophy in Ger-
many (1852), IV, 159; cf. VI, 54].

This fine tribute is altogether in keeping with Heine's reawakened
love for the culture of his forefathers, the more so as his praise goes

327

96 HI»MANN J. WEIGAND

out whole-heartedly only to the Old Testament in contrast to the
New, which at times offended his aesthetic sense by its wholesale
chastisements (VI, 54). As the loftiest monument of the lore of
his ancient race, the Bible kindled his imagination.

But this was not the first time that the Bible had entered into
Heine's life as a real experience. Under very different circum-
stances, twenty years earlier, on the island of Heligoland, he had
read the Bible with open eyes and been impressed by its grandeur.
At that time also the naive simplicity of its style had elicited from
him a tribute of unreserved praise, without, however, disturbing his
frank paganism (VII, 46, 52). Then he had read it as a literary
masterpiece; now he read it as a religious message.

So the question remains, Why did Heine now approach the
Bible in a religious frame of mind? It was not a case of Heine's
suddenly and unexpectedly finding his God in the Bible. Like the
prodigal son, as it were, he had turned his back on the pagan world
and started on his search for God. In this search he did not stumble
on the Bible. He went straight toward it, knowing that he would
find his God there.

Obviously, to rest content with the statement that the Bible
brought Heine back to God would be to evade the problem, since
his study of the Bible marked rather the end than the beginning of
his religious transformation. With the problem thus defined but
not solved, the real task is to trace Heine's religious attitude to its
source; to seek the conditions that encouraged its growth in the
basic impulses which constituted the driving forces of Heine's per-
sonality. Instead of asking what outside forces or circumstances
prompted Heine's return to God, one must rather ask what elements
of his make-up made Heine susceptible to religious ideas and senti-
ments, provided there was a combination of circumstances favoring
such a turn.

It is necessary to scrutinize Heine's life with a view to probing
how deeply any convictions on philosophical, religious, political,
and social questions permeated Heine's being; how far the tentacles
of any of Heine's theoretical beliefs reached into his personality
and how firmly they were imbedded in it. For if it should become
apparent that philosophical, religious, political, or social issues, as

328

HEINE'S RETURN TO GOD 97

such, did not touch the basic stratum of Heine's personality at all,
the solution of the question at issue would, in the nature of the case,
be a great deal nearer.

Frankly — though it involves anticipation — a dispassionate study
of Heine the man forces one to the unqualified conclusion that
theoretical issues of any kind whatever did not touch the core of
his personality. To put it briefly and in the form of an ethical
thesis : Heine lacked intellectual integrity of the highest order.

Barring the ethical significance of this observation, Heine him-
self, with his customary keenness of vision, felt a certain air of
unreality pervading all the issues on which he took sides as a spirited
fighter. He enjoyed the clash of intellects; he exulted in the sparks
that were drawn in the encounter of mind with mind; he loved the
spectacle of conflict — so much so that the sight of it would lull him
into a state of dreamy abstraction and make him forget for the
moment what it was all about. Waking up from his revery he
would realize that he was a dreamer rather than a fighter by tem-
perament; that while others were fighting beside him in the white
heat of passion, he fought in the mood of aesthetic play. His aware-
ness of this mood is admirably shown in a passage dating, it must
be remembered, from the days when Heine was still a good fighter:

Von Natur neige ich mich zu einem gewissen dolce far niente und ich
lagere mich gern auf blumige Rasen und betrachte dann die ruhigen Ztige
der Wolken und ergotze mich an ihrer Beleuchtung; doch der Zufall wollte,
dass ich aus dieser gemachlichen Traumerei sehr oft durch harte Rippen-
stosse des Schicksals geweckt wurde, und ich musste gezwungenerweise
teilnehmen an den Schmerzen und Kampfen der Zeit, und ehrlich war dann

meine Teilnahme, und ich schlug mich trotz den Tapfersten Aber

ich weiss nicht, wie ich mich ausdriicken soil, meine Empfindungen behielten
doch immer eine gewisse Abgeschiedenheit von den Empfindungen der
anderen; ich wusste wie ihnen zu Mute war, aber mir war ganz anders zu
Mute wie ihnen; und wenn ich mein Schlachtross auch noch so riistig
tummelte und mit dem Schwert auch noch so gnadenlos auf die Feinde
einhieb, so erfasste mich doch nie das Fieber oder die Lust oder die Angst
der Schlacht; ob meiner inneren Ruhe ward mir oft unheimlich zu Sinne,
ich merkte, dass die Gedanken anderortig verweilten, wahrend ich im dich-
testen Gedrange des Parteikriegs mich herumschlug, und ich kam mir
manchmal vor wie Ogier der Dane, welcher traumwandelnd gegen die
Sarazenen focht [Uber die franzosische Buhne (1837), IV, 542].

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98 HERMANN J. WEIGAND

The same mood prevails in his poem Ali Bei (1839), in which
he masquerades as a Saracen fighting the crusaders:

Und der Held besteigt sein Schlachtross,
Fliegt zum Kampf, doch wie im Traume;
Denn ihm ist zu Sinn als lag' er
Immer noch in Madchenarmen.

Wahrend er die Frankenkopfe
Dutzendweis heruntersabelt,
Lachelt er wie ein Verliebter,
Ja, er lachelt sanft und zartlich [I, 278].

It is also expressed in the opening paragraph of his Helgoland-
brief e (1830?) (VII, 42), and it comes again to the fore in a letter
to St. Rene* Taillandier of November 21, 1851:

Selbst ehedem, als ich gesund war, hatte die Begeisterung der Deutschen
fiir mich etwas Erschreckendes, das schlecht zu einer gewissen traumerischen
Grandezza passte, die in meiner Natur liegt.1

It might be objected that this mood of the unreality of conflict
was limited to issues of a political nature; but such doubts cannot
stand in the face of the testimony of Heine's Gestdndnisse. There he
comments on the end of his warfare against the Roman Catholic
church as follows:

Ich habe langst aller Befehdung derselben entsagt, und langst ruht in
der Scheide das Schwert, das ich einst zog im Dienste einer Idee und nicht
einer Privatleidenschaft. Ja, ich war in diesem Kampf gleichsam ein
officier de fortune, der sich brav schlagt aber nach der Schlacht oder nach
dem Scharmutzel keinen Tropfen Groll im Herzen bewahrt, weder gegen
die bekampfte Sache noch gegen ihre Vertreter [VI, 66].

Almost in the same breath, with the issues of Liberalism and
Jesuitism in mind, he makes a confession which does greater credit
to his faculty of self -analysis than to his intellectual integrity :

Und dann, ohne im geringsten die Hut meiner Parteiinteressen zu
verabsaumen, musste ich mir in der Besonnenheit meines Gemutes zuweilen
gestehen, wie es oft von den kleinsten Zufalligkeiten abhing, dass wir dieser
statt jener Partei zufielen und uns jetzt nicht in einem ganz entgegengesetzten
Feldlager befanden [VI, 68].

» Of. also the conclusion to chap, xxix of the Reise von Miinchen nach Genua, III, 276.

330

HEINE'S RETURN TO GOD 99

Expatiating on the fortuitous character of his development,
Heine then indulges in fond speculations as to what his career
might have been if his mother, who displayed a great deal of both
initiative and opportunism in determining upon the lines of his
early training (VII, 463-65), had followed one of the many alterna-
tives under consideration and consecrated him to the service of the
Catholic church. Picturing himself in the role of a Roman " abbate,"
a Papal nuntio, a cardinal, or even that of the pope himself, he
notes with satisfaction that such a career would have afforded him
ample opportunity to display his talents as a patron of art and
beauty. Moreover, he would have performed his clerical duties
with an inborn sense of the solemn gravity and aesthetic dignity
consonant with such a position. With a mien of imperturbable,
sacerdotal seriousness, heightened by the splendor of his gorgeous
vestments and the impressiveness of his ecclesiastical retinue, he
would have bestowed the annual blessing upon the whole Christen-
dom, "denn ich kann sehr ernst sein, wenn es durchaus notig 1st"
(VI, 69-71). How this trend of thought captivated Heine's fancy
is shown by the fact that in his Memoirs he indulged in dreams of a
similar vein, as is still apparent despite the fact that their substance,
among other matters, fell a victim to his cousin's ruthless censorship
(cf. VII, 460, 466).

If the foregoing data have established the view that social,
political, philosophical, and religious issues failed to touch the core
of Heine's personality, his late recantation on matters of religion
and morals must appear to presuppose less of a psychic revolution
than would otherwise have been the case. Then it is clear that
Heine's fundamental self was not affected by his return to God.

From this point of approach one is also able to understand how
from first to last Heine could maintain in the most emphatic terms
that his whole mental life presented a picture of consistent mental
unity, in spite of its glaring contradictions, and how he could insist
that inner unity was an indispensable condition to spiritual great-
ness. One recalls Heine's early claim to unity, couched in Hegelian
terms, as formulated in his correspondence with his friend Moser.1

1 For example on November 27, 1823, Heine says that he expects to show "wie
mem ganzes, trtibes, drangvolles Leben in das Uneigenntitzigste, in die Idee, ubergeht."

331

100 HERMANN J. WEIGAND

One meets it again in the Preface to the second edition of the Buck
der Lieder (1837). 1 In his Borne he repeats this claim by implication
in the statement "dass ohne innere Einheit keine geistige Grosse
moglich ist" (VII, 135). And finally, after the Gestdndnisse had
been given to the world, Heine reiterates it in such a way as to show
plainly that his sense of inner unity had remained intact despite the
collapse of his paganism. Writing to Campe, he comments on his
latest productions as follows:

Diese Poesien sind etwas ganz Neues und geben keine alten Stimm-
ungen in alter Manier; aber zu ihrer Wiirdigung sind nur die ganz naiven
Naturen und die ganz grossen Kritiker berufen. Die Gestandnisse sind
ebenfalls nicht jedem zuganglich, doch sind sie wichtig, indem die Einheit
aller meiner Werke und meines Lebens besser begriffen wird [August 3, 1854].

What a tenacious sense of unity for a poet whose life presents
the classical example of Zerrissenheit! This sense of unity despite
contradiction is so startling a trait of Heine's nature that an under-
standing of its basis may well furnish the key to Heine's whole per-
sonality. It may even bear out Heine's contention that his return
to God was but a phase of a consistent process of evolution.

The more one scrutinizes Heine's life, the more impossible does
it become to base his sense of unity on any logical unity of life-long
plan and purpose. Moreover, had there been any such rational
unity, Heine would have undoubtedly given it a clear-cut formula-
tion. All the facts tend to show that Heine rather had in mind a
strong sense of continuity which he confused with consistency, and
that he spoke of unity where consistency would have been the only
appropriate term (as is at least the case in the above-quoted letter
to Campe) solely because, in spite of himself, he still talked the
language of Hegelianism which interpreted the world as a logical
phenomenon.

I hold, however, the view that Heine's life presents, in fact, a
marked psychological continuity, apart from the formal unity which
the life of every individual involves in so far as it is the totality of
experience bound up with a single body. I would formulate the
continuity pervading Heine's life as follows:

1 "Bemerken muss ich jedoch, dass meine poetischen, eben so gut wie meine politi-
schen, theologischen und philosophischen Schriften einem und dernselben Gedanken
entsprossen sind .... (I, 497).

332

HEINE'S RETURN TO GOD 101

Heine was from first to last a modern Narcissus, enamored
of his own image.1 The world of nature and the world of men
was to him a vast many-sided mirror in which he always beheld
himself with infinite pleasure. He felt a tenderness, a fondness,
a compassion, an admiration toward his own soul amounting to
worship. He loved his body with equal fervor. His hands, his
eyes, his lips, his forehead were objects on which he lavished
his affection. He was enamored of the sweet odor of his body.
Besides loving himself, he craved the personal flattery of others.
To his inmost self his art and the fame it brought him were essen-
tially personal ornaments — accomplishments that graced his person-
ality. The political arena was to him but a stage where he could
strike a heroic pose and drape his garment about him in the most
becoming folds. And all this with the naive self-assurance, the
graceful poise of the born aesthete who knows he cannot help
but please !

This extraordinary self-love is exposed to full view in his two
earliest letters to his friend Sethe (July 6 and October 27, 1816).
It is the ever-recurrent theme of his early love poetry. It explains
the fearful nature of the crisis that broke when the object which he
had singled out for his love dared not to return it. It is the center
of the complex from which the sadistic and masochistic visions of
the Almansor and Ratcliff detached themselves. It is the one firm
thread that holds together the ramblings of his Reisebilder and gives
their characteristic flavor — and most piquant charm — to all his
subsequent writings. And this love of his person — his body as
well as his soul — never parted company with Heine during the
long years of his martyrdom.

To lay bare Heine's Narcissus-love in full would require a sub-
stantial monograph in itself, but as Heine's ostentatious coquetry
with his person has so often been pointed out by both benevolent
and hostile critics, this general statement may suffice here. It
seems to me, however, that in the interpretation of Heine's per-
sonality this peculiar form of " autoerotism " has never received

1 Narcissism is clearly recognized by students of sex pathology such as Krafft-Ebing,
Havelock Ellis, Freud, etc., as one of the types of sexual inversion — psychic as well as
physical. The term "Narcissism" is borrowed from the familiar Greek myth of the
youth Narcissus who fell in love with his own image, mirrored in the water.

333

102 HERMANN J. WEIGAND

sufficiently serious consideration; for it appears to me such a funda-
mental trait of his nature that its manifestation was as natural to
Heine and as automatic almost as the act of breathing. This love
of his person was so intimately real to Heine, that beside it all
"issues" paled into unreality.

Examples could be multiplied to show how Heine's Narcissus-
love maintained itself undimmed to the end, but I think the analysis
of a single one will suffice. I have in mind Heine's sketch of his
father in his Memoirs. Written almost thirty years after his
father's death, it can lay no claim to realistic accuracy. It is all
the more valuable on that account as revealing the workings of the
fancy that retouched the portrait.

Heine says that he loved his father most of all human beings.
His pen portrait is therefore bound to render the characteristic
traits that made his memory so beloved to his son. It is bound to
reproduce qualities which in their combination impressed Heine as
supremely winning and lovable. Analysis will show that the very-
qualities which made him treasure his father's memory were also
most deeply rooted in his own nature. Quite unconsciously, per-
haps, he superposed his own image upon that of his father in record-
ing the impression of his father's temperament which lingered in his
mind. One must read that sketch in its entirety (Memoiren, VII,
482-511) to appreciate in full how the traits that constituted Heine's
being are here rendered in a more primitive eighteenth-century
setting, in a modest environment of the petite bourgeosie.

His father, as Heine remembers him, was endowed with a
boundless joyousness of temperament. " Er war genusssiichtig, froh-

sinnig, rosenlaunig Immer himmelblaue Heiterkeit und Fan-

faren des Leichtsinns." In apparent contradiction with this
lightheartedness stood a self-conscious, dignified gravity of deport-
ment, a pose of solemnity and importance, which, though genuine, gave
the most piquant flavor to his personality. "Jene Gravitat war
zwar nicht erborgt, aber sie erinnerte doch an jene antiken Basreliefs,
wo ein heiteres Kind sich eine grosse tragische Maske vor das Antlitz
halt." He had, in fact, the naive simplicity of a child, combining
with it a surprising depth of intuition. The quality of his voice
enhanced this childlike character, suggesting forest sounds to Heine

334

HEINE'S RETURN TO GOD

103

by its peculiar timber. Consonant with the gravity of his demeanor
was the sedulous care which he bestowed upon his body. In recall-
ing the immaculate whiteness of his finely chiseled hand and the
delicate flavor of almonds which emanated from it when Heine
stooped to kiss it, he is almost moved to tears.

To this big eighteenth-century child, life was a great game in
which he was absorbed with the same seriousness as a child in its
play. Even his business was but a phase of this great make-believe
game of seriousness. "Seine Tatigkeit war eigentlich nur eine
unaufhorliche Geschaftigkeit." His trade in velveteens was man-
aged not like a business but like a hobby. Uppermost in his mind
was not a desire to profit but a desire to please.

This desire to please led him to practice the most generous
liberality toward the poor of Dtisseldorf. He gave with an open
hand, and in his giving he displayed such intuitive tact and courtesy
that he won the love of all the old mendicant women whose lot he
lightened. But in addition he won their flattery, and this made
him as happy as a king. The love of flattery was his most amiable
weakness.

Da nun fur schone Manner, deren Spezialitat darin besteht, dass sie
schone Manner sind, die Schmeichelei ein grosses Bediirfnis ist, und es ihnen
dabei gleichgiiltig ist, ob der Weihrauch aus einem rosichten oder welken
Munde kommt, wenn er nur stark und reinlich hervorquillt, so begreift
man, wie mein teurer Vater, ohne eben darauf spekuliert zu haben, dennoch
in seinem Verkehr mit den alten Damen ein gutes Geschaft machte.

Es ist unbegreiflich, wie gross oft die Dosis Weihrauch war, mit welcher
sie ihn eindampften, und wie gut er die starkste Portion vertragen konnte.
Das war sein gliickliches Temperament, durchaus nicht Einfalt. Er wusste
sehr wohl, dass man ihm schmeichelte, aber er wusste auch, dass Schmeichelei
wie Zucker immer suss ist, und er war wie das Kind, welches zu der Mutter
sagt: Schmeichle mir ein bischen, sogar ein bischen zu viel [VII, 495].

If Heine's sketch of his father presents with any degree of
fidelity the character of his parent, then it is obvious that the father
was a complete impersonation of the Narcissus-type; then it appears
also that it was either a hereditary predisposition or the force of
example which fostered a similar development in his son. Quite
apart, however, from any such hypothesis, the love with which Heine
dwells on his father's smiling good humor, on his childlike gravity

335

104 HERMANN J. WEIGAND

of deportment, on his sedulous attention to his body, on his sense of
unreality, face to face with the serious business of the world, on his
liberality, his tact, his politeness, and on his craving for personal
flattery — all this accentuates in the most striking manner the Nar-
cissus-character of Heine's own temperament. Heine does not
record these qualities of his father with any air of detachment; he
does not assume the superior attitude of the benevolent critic. He
speaks of them as one who is charmed by them to the utmost degree;
as one who regards them as priceless treasures. He speaks as one
who knows them not by observation from without but by intuition
from within.1

It seems to me that Heine's Narcissus-character provided a
natural bridge by means of which the transition from paganism to
religious inwardness took place.

In 1848 the time had arrived when Heine could no longer con-
ceal from himself the fact that his days of joy were numbered. He
had had ample warning. The first signs of paralysis had made
themselves felt in the early thirties. In 1843 matters became worse.
For long periods physicians were in constant attendance. In 1845
the news of his uncle's will, which left him a miserable pittance
instead of the comfortable annuity he had expected, precipitated a
crisis. Death seemed imminent, but his nature triumphed. But
then followed the long tenacious struggle in which, with the power
lent by hate, Heine pitted all his resources against his relatives in
order to compel them by fair means or foul, by flattery, by negotia-
tion, by intimidation and public defamation to guarantee him the
pension which he had enjoyed during his uncle's lifetime. He won
out, but not before the poison of hate had done its deadly work
upon his body. In 1848 he was a hopeless paralytic, facing death
as the only hope of liberation from his tortures.

He could no longer pursue the enjoyment in which he had
reveled. He could no longer pose as Bacchus, glorying in wine and
sensuous beauty. But he still loved himself with all the passionate
ardor of which his being was capable. He still loved his decrepit,
enfeebled body, but he wanted to think of it as beautiful and pleasing

1 Is there a more exquisite Narcissus fancy conceivable than Heine's picturing him-
self arrayed in the pontifical robes ?

336

HEINE'S RETURN TO GOD 105

to the last. But with his eye set upon the beauty of robust
health and bodily vigor — how could his helpless, wasted body help
but revolt all his aesthetic sensibilities! The Hellenism which he
had so exultantly proclaimed demanded that he avert his gaze
from himself in pitying silence.

This situation brought Heine face to face with the most trying
crisis of his life. Either that fondly nursed love for his bodily self
must be uprooted, or he must abandon the aesthetic ideals which
were his most characteristic contribution to the life of his age. He
must either be true to his past self and await death in stoic blind-
ness, or he must cast his past aside and embrace a new ideal of
beauty with which to make something harmonious, noble, impres-
sive, beautiful, winning, and lovable even out of the wreckage of his
body. The crisis lasted until he knew that his fate was sealed.
Then his self irresistibly gravitated toward the latter alternative.

Thus a mood of grave, tranquil, sometimes somber seriousness
instinctively began to replace in Heine's heart the light-hearted
laughter of his former days, as becoming to his altered status.
Sallies of wit, choice conceits, bizarre anachronisms, flashes of
fantastic humor adorn his language as of old — but now they occur
as quaint arabesques traced against a background of solemn gravity.
The poetry of the Romanzero, and the last poems, is that of a sage
whose dying body is transfigured with a spiritual beauty. The
seriousness of death pervades the very technique of Heine's most
characteristic last productions, such as Vitzliputzli, Spanische
Atriden, Prinzessin Sabbath, Jehuda ben Halevy, and Bimini. Here
the concentration of Heine's earlier poetry is entirely wanting.
There is none of the economy that makes for epigrammatic con-
clusions. The progression is leisurely; transitions are lengthy.
There is frequent repetition without the character of refrain. Similes
and metaphors trail and ramble without the least effort at compres-
sion. The rhymeless verse has not a trace of rhetorical pathos.
It progresses with the calm precision of the most finely chiseled
prose, in which no sound can be slurred without marring the euphony
of the whole. The vocalic richness and often the very length of the
exotic words with which the lines are studded add to their impres-
siveness. All haste is absent. Here is the grave leisurely calm,

337

106 HEI&IANN J. WEIGAND

the complete self-possession, the serene poise of the consummate
self-conscious artist whose words bear the message of spiritual
beauty. And the beauty of these poems casts its reflection on the
bodily form of the heroic sufferer whose trembling hand traced out
their perfect lines in the intervals of his agony. His pallid, bearded
face with the half -closed eyelids appears more lovable than did ever
the rosy countenance of Bacchus.

To speak of this mood of grave dignity which gradually super-
seded the wanton laughter of happier days as a pose, were to miss
its true character. Pose implies conscious affectation, whereas here
is an attitude which grew spontaneously out of the roots of Heine's
being. One recalls how Heine's conscious self at first viewed with
alarm the change preparing within him. On the other hand, Heine's
sense of unreality in regard to issues applies equally to this sustained
mood of solemn seriousness.

Steeped as Heine was in the atmosphere of this mood, the rebirth
of his love for Judaism followed as a natural development. At the
time of his Hellenism the Greek ideal had stood for joy, and Judaism
had faced it frowning with the scowl of harsh asceticism. When
there was no longer any room for joy, the contrast between the two
great types of human ideals remained as pronounced as ever, but
by a slight shifting of the point of view the harsh asceticism of
Judaism softened into lofty sublimity.1 As such it had assumed
the aspect of an aesthetic phenomenon, inviting 'Heine's loving con-
templation. He could now lose himself in the contemplation of
the morality which was the essence of Judaism, not as a practical
but as an aesthetic phenomenon on a par with the sensuous beauty
of Greece. When Heine was still among the living, morality had
faced him as an unlovely practical imperative; now, when only a
feeble spark of life retarded the total dissolution of his body, morality
was only a phenomenon passing before the mind's eye, no longer
threatening with any practical demands upon his extinguished senses.
Thus his Narcissus-love which prescribed grave solemnity as the
becoming gesture of death turned his aesthetic contemplation upon
a sphere where solemn seriousness reigned with undisputed sway. As

i The reader will recall that this transition is suggested by Kant's dichotomy of
the aesthetic into the "beautiful" and the "sublime."

338

HEINE'S RETURN TO GOD

107

a poet to whom every idea transformed itself into a concrete sym-
bolical vision, Heine expressed the quintessence of Judaism in the
words: "Israel sass fromm unter seinem Feigenbaum und sang das
Lob des unsichtbaren Gottes" (VI, 61). x

If the symbolism of this passage has made it strikingly clear that
morality appealed to Heine as an aesthetic attitude and by no
means as a practical postulate, it requires little imaginative insight
to see that this aesthetic morality would have been meaningless
without a God. Being essentially a contemplative worship of
divine beauty, it would have been empty without a divine creator
responsive to human adoration. There was more than mere affec-
tation in the horror with which Heine twenty years earlier had dis-
cussed Fichte's sternly practical postulate of morality in which God
was replaced by the abstract concept of law. At that time he had
written: "Der Fichtesche Idealismus gehort zu den kolossalsten
Irrtumern, die jemals der menschliche Geist ausgeheckt. Er ist
gottloser und verdammlicher als der plumpste Materialismus. So
viel weiss ich, beide sind mir zuwider." And he had added:
"Beide Ansichten sind auch antipoetisch " (IV, 276). If at that
time a moral world without a God impressed Heine as monstrous
and unpoetical, how much more must this have been the case now,
when he identified himself with the spiritual beauty of Judaism which
turned about the adoration of the Creator. The God of his fore-
fathers satisfied his poet's craving for the tangible and the concrete.
And true to his Narcissus-self in all things he retouched the portrait
of the God of his fathers in conformity with his own image, making
of him, as it were, a divine Narcissus.

1 To appreciate the significance of this image one must bear in mind that Heine's
imagination automatically concentrated the quintessence of a situation into a dramatic
gesture. Helene Herrmann has pointed out the prevalence of "Die Geste des Unter-
gangs" in the Romamero. I quote a few striking examples of the dramatic gesture from
other contexts:

"Es ist, als ob Rahel wusste, welche posthume Sendung ihr beschieden war. Sie
glaubte freilich es wtirde besser werden und wartete; doch als des Wartens kein Ende
nahm, schuttelte sie ungeduldig den Kopf, sah Varnhagen an, und starb schnell — um
desto schneller auferstehn zu konnen" (I, 497).

Speaking of his failure to defend himself in 1848 against the insinuation that he had
been bought by the French government: "Wer einen schonen Mantel besass, verhullte
darin sein Antlitz" (VI, 374).

On the abdication of Louis Philippe: "Als es gait, auf das Volk schiessen zu lassen,
uberschlich inn die alte philanthropische Weichherzigkeit, und er warf die Krone von
sich, ergriff seinen Hut und nahm seinen alten Regenschirm und seine Prau unter den
Arm, und empfahl sich" (VI, 539).

339

108 HERMANN J. WEIGAND

The intimate interpenetration of religious emotion and Narcissus-
love in Heine's inner world found its most beautiful expression in the
Jehuda ben Halevy of the Hebrew Melodies. The hero of the poem is
ostensibly a pious Jewish poet of medieval Spain, but in reality the
portrait of Jehuda bears Heine's own idealized features. Such
lines as

Ich erkannt' ihn an der bleichen

Und gedankenstolzen Stirne,

An der Augen siisser Starrheit —

Sahn mich an so schmerzlich forschend —

Doch zumeist erkannt' ich ihn

An dem ratselhaften Lacheln

Jener schon gereimten Lippen,

Die man nur bei Dichtern findet [I, 438],

show Heine contemplating his own countenance transfigured with
spiritual beauty. And in the following lines the sudden transition
from the third person to the first removes even the thin veil of
fiction :

Rein und wahrhaft, sender Makel

War sein Lied, wie seine Seele —

Als der Schopfer sie erschaffen,

Diese Seele, selbstzufrieden

Ktisste er die schone Seele,
Und des Kusses holder Nachklang
Bebt in jedem Lied des Dichters,
Das geweiht durch diese Gnade.

Wie im Leben, so im Dichten
1st das hochste Gut die Gnade —
Wer sie hat, der kann nicht siind'gen
Nicht in Versen, noch in Prosa.

Solchen Dichter von der Gnade
Gottes nennen wir Genie;
Unverantwortlicher Konig
Des Gedankenreiches ist er.

Nur dem Gotte steht er Rede,
Nicht dem Volke — In der Kunst,
Wie im Leben kann das Volk
Toten uns, doch niemals richten [I, 443].
340

HEINE'S RETURN TO GOD

109

Has ever poet conceived a more far-reaching apotheosis of his
soul and of his art!

And when Heine extols the song of Jehuda as costlier than
priceless pearls, to what songs but his own does he pay this tribute!

Doch die Perlen hier im Kastchen
Sind entquollen einer schonen
Menschenseele, die noch tiefer,
Abgrundtiefer als das Weltmeer —

Denn es sind die Thranenperlen
Des Jehuda ben Halevy,
Die er ob dem Untergang
Von Jerusalem geweinet — •

Perlenthranen, die verbunden
Durch des Reimes goldnen Faden,
Aus der Dichtkunst giildnen Schmiede
Als ein Lied hervorgegangen [I, 454].

Perhaps here the destruction of Jerusalem is even felt as a symbol
of the destruction of the splendid temple of his body. But Heine's
Narcissus-love reaches its climax in the delicious picture of the
martyred poet's reception into heaven :

Droben, heisst es, harrte seiner
Ein Empfang, der schmeichelhaft
Ganz besonders fur den Dichter,
Eine himmlische Surprise.

Festlich kam das Chor der Engel
Ihm entgegen mit Musik,
Und als Hymne griissten ihn
Seine eignen Verse, jenes.

Synagogen-Hochzeitskarmen,
Jene Sabbath-Hymenaen,
Mit den jauchzend wohlbekannten
Melodien — welche Tone!

Englein bliesen auf Hoboen,
Englein spielten Violine,
Andre strichen auch die Bratsche
Oder schlugen Pauk' und Zimbel.
341

110 HERMANN J. WEIGAND

Und das sang und klang so lieblich,
Und so lieblich in den weiten
Himmelshallen widerhallt es;
Lecho Daudi Likras Kalle [I, 456].

What a priceless comfort the presence of such a thoughtful
father in heaven must have been to the dying poet ! What a precious
part of his soul unfolded itself at the price of those years of agony!

The Narcissus-complex of Heine's personality has revealed itself
as the force that brought the poet back to God. What seemed at
first a perplexing puzzle, devoid of inner logic, at best an irrational
caprice, has taken on the aspect of a gradual psychological develop-
ment. It has become apparent that Heine's return to God did not
involve the disintegration of his inmost self. His real self triumphed
over all adversities and maintained itself to the last.

Pathologists tell us that all inversions of the sex impulse, psychic
as well as physical, have their roots in the life of the child. They
involve a stoppage of the normal development and a fixation of the
character of childhood.1 Thus Heine's Narcissus-character reveals
him as a perpetual child. He was a great child in his attitude
toward the serious issues of life, despite his wonderful art. In his
childlikeness lies the secret of his greatness as well as that of his
limitations. His child's quickness of perception, his child's keen-
ness of intuition, and his childlike frankness made him at the same
time the most colorful and the most subtly introspective of Romantic
poets. But his childlike instinct for play rendered him unfit for
the task of solving any of the serious social or religious problems of
civilization.

HERMANN J. WEIGAND
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

1 Recent psychology has tended to see in conversion a reversion to the mental life
of the child (cf. A. Adler, The Neurotic Constitution, [London, 1919]). At first sight
this view would seem not to apply in the case of Heine's gravitation toward religion,
since the environment of his childhood did not favor the cultivation of any deep religi-
osity— Jewish, Catholic, and free-thinking influences pouring in upon him in quick suc-
cession. Strictly speaking, therefore, the religious life of his childhood can not be said
to have re-emerged. Nevertheless, if it is true that Heine's Narcissus-love prompted
his return to God, it follows that here also it was a childhood complex which conditioned
the transformation.

342

N HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED POEM BY FRIEDRICH
VON SCHILLER

In the summer of 1904 I purchased of Friedrich Strobel in Jena
an album of prose and verse, in the handwriting of Caroline Junot
(ne'e Schiller), the oldest daughter of Friedrich Schiller. Among
other interesting jottings and fragments, it contains the following
hitherto unpublished poem, ascribed by the author of the album to
her father. There appears no valid reason for doubting the genu-
ineness of the poem, which Caroline designates specifically as
unpublished, however difficult it may be to fix the date of its
composition :

Ist's ein Geschenk, dasz an den Staub gekettet
Wir durch den Wink des Unerforschten sind ?
Wenn er uns nicht von der Vernichtung rettet,
In die des Lebens letzter Hauch verrinnt ?

Ist's ein Geschenk, ein Leben, das im Werden
Schon winselnd mit des Todes Schrecken ringt ?
Wenn nicht die Zukunft nach dem Kampf auf Erden
Uns trostend wie die Morgenrote winkt ?

Wenn nicht fur vieles^unverdientes Leiden
Zum siiszen Lohn der Ewige uns weckt ?
Wenn nicht den Schurken im Genusz der Freuden
Der Zukunft Donnerstimme niederschreckt ?

Der Geist versinkt in diesem Zweifelmeere.
Kein milder Stern in dieser dunkeln Nacht.
Wer kennt den Kompasz, der den Pfad uns lehre
Zu jenem Lande, das der Tod bewacht ?

Du, sanfter Glaube, von Vernunft geleitet,
Du, ew'ger Fiihrer auf der finstern Bahn,
Nur du hast die Versich'rung mir bereitet,
Dasz ich des ktinft'gen Seins mich freueri kann.
343] 111 [MODBEN PHILOLOGY, October, 1920

112 STARR WlLLARD CUTTING

Du hellst die dunkeln Zweifel meiner Seele,
Du leitest aus dem Irrsal meinen Geist,
Du siehst es, dasz ich mich vergebens quale,
Da alles hin auf ew'ge Dauer weist.

Du losest das geheimnisvolle Siegel,
Das uns das Buch der Ewigkeit verschlieszt;
Du zeigest uns der Gottheit heil'gen Spiegel,
Wo uns die Blume schoner Zukunft sprieszt.

The argumentative religious tone of these lines points to their
early composition as an expression of the poet's view of human life.
They are apparently an elaborate formulation of the thought con-
tained in Schiller's four-line epigram, copied by the poet's brother-
in-law, Reinwald, and contained in Christophine's posthumous
papers. This epigram, published by Bellermann (Schillers Werke,
IX, 66) as No. 32, Zuversicht der Unsterblichkeit, in the Anthologie auf
das Jahr 1782, reads as follows:

Zum neuen Leben ist der Tote hier entstanden,
Das weisz und glaub' ich festiglich,
Mich lehren's schon die Weisen ahnden,
Und Schurken iiberzeugen mich.

The common argument for personal immortality, based upon the
need of another life for the divine punishment of the prosperously
and joyously wicked in this life (cf. the third stanza of the poem and
the final line of the epigram) suggests a genetic connection between
the two expressions of religious faith. The epigram is terser and
artistically maturer than the stanzas of 'the poem. Without attempt-
ing to fix more definitely the date of either, I am inclined to regard
the epigram as Schiller's later and final formulation of the thought
of the earlier poem.

STARR WILLARD CUTTING
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

344

Modern Philology

VOLUME XVIII

November

NUMBER 7

LA CALPRENfiDE DRAMATIST. II

A cursory glance at the tragi-comedy called Edouard indicates
that it has to do with incidents from the life of Edward III of Eng-
land. The king, falling in love with Elips, Countess of Salisbury,
seeks to use her father, an honorable old man and distinguished
warrior, as a go-between. After a struggle between his honor and his
fidelity to the king, he takes Edward's proposition to his daughter,
who refuses to yield, much to her father's gratification. Isabella,
the queen mother, and Mortimer, her lover, plot to overthrow the
influence of Elips, in whose honor the Order of the Garter has been
established. To make her leave court they warn her that Edward
is preparing to use force. She replies that she always carries a
dagger, with which she will kill herself if it is necessary. Taking
advantage of her confidence, Mortimer tells Edward that she is
seeking his life and that a weapon will be found if she is searched.
Thereupon the king tells her of his suspicions and confirms them
by the discovery of a dagger in her sleeve.

The fourth act is devoted to the deliberation of Edward and his
lords as to the guilt of the countess and her father. The king
offers to pardon both if she will yield to him, but his offer is refused.
Finally the countess explains to the king why she had the dagger.
He is at once convinced of her innocence. Mortimer, forced to

345] 57 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, November, 1920

58 H. CARRINGTON LANCASTER

confess, is sent to execution. Edward orders his mother to her
home, where she will be guarded, and announces that he will marry
the virtuous Elips.

Departures from history are obvious. Edward was already
married to Philippa when he met the Countess of Salisbury. Mor-
timer was executed and Isabella kept at home for a very different
reason from the one here given. The story of the dagger is not
found in accounts of Edward III. There are, however, historical
elements in the play. The marriage of an English king with a
woman, not of royal birth, whom he had tried in vain to seduce is
true, not of Edward III, but of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville.
Froissart,1 following Jehan le Bel,2 relates that Edward III, visiting
a castle which the Countess of Salisbury had bravely defended
against the Scots during her husband's absence in France, fell very
much in love with her, but that his advances were repelled. This
anecdote, amplified by suggestions furnished, perhaps, by the
marriage of Edward IV, provides the material for one of Bandello's
novelle? repeated by Boisteau,4 who changes the heroine's name,
perhaps on account of a careless reading, to Oelips. Finding the
story brief, La Calpren£de added the plotting of Mortimer and
Isabella, whose relations and whose fate are described by Froissart.
He omitted the countess' mother, whose role would have appeared
odious on the stage, and began after the death of the earl. Half
his play is new. Influenced, perhaps, by the success of his other
plays with English plots, he added trial scenes and English nobles,
two of whose names, Glocester and Norfolk, he had already employed
in leanne d'Angleterre.

The plot is poorly constructed, for the denouement depends
entirely on Edward's decision to pardon and marry the countess,
which is the result of her confession. There is little reason why this
confession could not be made as soon as the supposed purpose to

i Book I, Part I, chaps, clxv-clxviii, cxci, cxcil. The execution of Mortimer and the
imprisonment of Isabella are described in chap. 1 of the same part.

* Chronique, chaps. 1 and Ixv. Le Bel is less near La CalprenSde than Froissart is,
for in his version the countess is finally raped by the king.

» Seconda Parte, Novella xxxvii; cf. G. Lebau, Kdnig Edward III ton England
und die Orafin eon Salisbury (Berlin, 1900).

« Hittoire* tragiques (Paris, 1660), first story.

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LA CALPRENEDE DRAMATIST 59

kill the king was discovered. Hence the last two acts appear largely
superfluous, brought in for the sake of individual scenes. Psycho-
logical struggles are not neglected. The king is caught between his
duty to the state and his love of the countess. Whether he had
the power to marry a woman who was not of royal blood is not ex-
plained, nor is it made clear why he should believe that the countess
wished to kill him and thus lose her only chance for power. The
immorality and brutality of La Calpren£de's Edward are historical
enough. His role of melancholy lover comes from Bandello's
narrative. The countess has to defend her virtue against the king,
supported, to a certain extent, by her father. She is in love neither
with Edward nor with her husband's memory. The character,
though brave, is cold. One wonders whether, after all, her conduct
is not calculated as the best means of reaching the throne. An
interesting character is that of her father, the Earl of Warwick,
who has to choose between his family honor and his loyalty to the
monarch. His shame at the king's proposition is well depicted.
It is after he has promised to aid the king that he learns the service
to be rendered is the betrayal of his daughter. When he finds that
she is ashamed of him for bringing the king's proposition, he is as
delighted as Don Di&gue was on discovering his son's agreable colere.
Despite this interesting figure, however, the play is distinctly inferior
to the author's English tragedies in its characters as well as in its
plot and the value of individual scenes.

III. HIS LAST PLAYS

In Essex the dramatic talent of La Calpren£de reached its
climax. After Edouard he seems to cast about for a subject, con-
tinuing another author's production, returning to the non-historical
play, writing a tragedy in prose. When none of these efforts brought
to his work the genuine renovation that he sought, he turned to the
novel. It is his last efforts at dramatic expression that I would now
discuss.

The most popular tragedy playing toward 1639 was Tristan's
Mariane, for the Cid was still considered a tragi-comedy. Attempts
had been made to continue the latter play. La Calpren&de now
sought with his Mort des enfans d'Herodes ou suite de Mariane to

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60 H. CAARINGTON LANCASTER

perform a similar service for the former, finding his material in the
same source that Tristan1 had used, Josephus.2 The account there
given of Herod's judicial murder of his two sons is followed with
some omissions and additions. The distribution of the dramatic
material and the characterization of Herod are under the influence
of Tristan, but the interest is less concentrated than in his model,
not only because there are two victims instead of the single and more
arresting character of Mariane, but because certain unnecessary
details are introduced from the Jewish narrative.

The first act is largely superfluous, as it brings in three elements
from Josephus that have no effect upon the play's progress: Alex-
ander's fear that his wife, Glaphira, may be the object of his father's
passion, Herod's remorse over the execution of Mariane, and the
banishment of Pherore. The real action begins with the second
act, in which Herod's other legitimate son, Aristobulus, angers his
half-brother, Antipater, by referring contemptuously to his illegiti-
mate birth. The latter, already seeking to undo his brothers,
pretends by means of forged letters that the princes are planning
Herod's arrest. These fraudulent documents and Salome's sugges-
tions cause Herod to throw his sons into prison, despite the efforts
of Glaphira and an ambassador from her father's court. False
evidence is obtained against them. Their trial is conducted by
Herod with marked injustice, although, contrary to Josephus, they
are allowed to defend themselves, and Glaphira is introduced as a
witness. In the fifth act the brothers appear in prison, Alexander
fearing Herod's designs on his wife, Aristobulus hoping for mercy till
they are ordered out to be executed, whereupon Alexander prays that
Herod be forgiven and Glaphira protected, while Aristobulus expresses
his readiness to saouler ce monstre et reioindre la Reyne. A last touch
of cruelty is given to Herod when he promises Glaphira to spare his
sons, knowing they are already dead.3 The last scene shows her in
the prison beside the dead bodies of the princes.

1 The association between the two plays is so close that the frontispiece to Tristan's
Mariane (Paris: Courb§, 1637) was used for La Calpren&de's play in 1639. See Jacques
Madeleine, Tristan, La Mariane (Paris: Hachette, 1917), p. xxix.

2 Antiquities, XVI, chaps, ii, iv, vii-xi, and Jewish Wars, I, chaps, xxiii, xxiv,
xxvii, xxviii.

» It is in a similar vein that Racine makes Nero accept his mother's demand for his
reconciliation with Britannicus.

348

LA CALPRENEDE DRAMATIST 61

Most of the incidents are found, as I have said, in Josephus.
Glaphira's appeal to Salome is substituted for that of Aristobulus.
The testimony of Eurycles, Tero, Trypho, and the eunuchs is omitted
as involving needless repetition. Alterations in the trial have been
indicated. The last act is uninfluenced by Josephus, who merely
states that the young men were strangled in prison. A comparison
with Mariane shows a structural similarity between the plays. In
each the first act introduces Herod and Salome, the second shows the
victim angering, by haughtiness, an unscrupulous enemy, the forma-
tion of a conspiracy, the making of an accusation, and an arrest. The
trial follows in the third act of Mariane, but it is delayed till the
fourth act of the later play. In both trials the defendant is defiant,
the decision held in doubt by a momentary display of compassion
on the part of Herod. Then, in each case, a prison scene is added,
the victims are led out to their execution, and the play ends in a
monologue expressing sorrow.

The characterization of Herod is also influenced by Tristan, but
the result is less successful. This role had been played by Mondory,
and, indeed, the new tragedy may have been written chiefly to show
Herod again to an admiring public. In Tristan's work the cruel
and jealous king, driven by his love to kill the person he most desires
to save, is a highly dramatic figure. But in La Calprenede's play
his paternal feeling is not made sufficiently evident for us to be sure
there is a struggle in his breast. He appears more purely the melo-
dramatic monster. Moreover, we are not sure whether or not he
desires to take his son's wife for himself, whether or not he feels
remorse over the execution of the princes.1

We miss, too, the proud figure of Mariane. The interest in the
victim is divided between the two sons, who would have been more
truly tragic if less effort had been made to correct their arrogance and
who lack the force to make any other effort to save themselves than
a feeble preparation for escape, which results only in their being
more deeply compromised. Glaphira is a purely pathetic figure,
displaying none of the pride of birth with which Josephus credits her.
Had the suggestion that Herod was in love with her been developed,
she might have become a dramatic figure. As it is, she bears some

1 As in Josephus, Herod dyes his hair, a strange detail to find in a classical tragedy.

349

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62 H. CARRINGTON LANCASTER

resemblance to the Berenice of La Calpren&de's first play and, like
her, is not essential to the action. Hence one is surprised to find
her playing so important a role at the end of the tragedy. D'Aubig-
nac1 contrasts her final monologue with the concluding speech of
Herod in Mariane and of Elizabeth in the Comte d'Essex. The
audience wishes to see how Herod and Elizabeth are affected by the
death of their victims, whom they still love, but it is little interested
in Glaphira, who has only the usual commonplaces of an afflicted
widow to express. While Herod's monologue and Elizabeth's are
needed to complete the play in which they occur, Glaphira's is
superfluous.

Phalante need not detain us. It is non-historical, as far as I
have been able to determine, like Du Ryer's Alcionee. It is precieux
both in subject-matter and in treatment, a subject for comedy,
entitled tragedy because of the intensity of the sentiments expressed
and the death of all the important persons in the play. He*lene,
queen of Corinth, is loved by her subject, Philoxene, and a princely
refugee, Phalante, whom she loves in return. The plot depends
entirely upon the fact that Philoxene has asked Phalante to urge
his suit for him. Without this request there would be no play.
As it is, Phalante is divided between love of the queen and fidelity
to his friend; Helene, between love and modesty. "En fin, Pha-
lante, I'ayme, 6 Dieu! ce mot me tue."2 And so, if not the word,
the thing does kill her, for, after a duel between the rivals, one
of whom throws himself upon the other's unwilling sword, and the
departure of Phalante to the wilds to mourn his friend, she can find
no better solution of her problems than to take poison. Phalante
comes back for a last interview with her, then stabs himself.

Of far greater interest is Hermenigilde, an experimental play both
in its prose form and in the fact that it treats of a martyrdom.
Puget de la Serre had already written a number of prose tragedies.
La Calprenede, either because the novelty of the form interested
him, or because, busy with the composition of his first romance, he
now had little time to write verse, imitated him, as did d'Aubignac,
Scudery, and Du Ryer. His experiment seems to have failed, for

1 Pratique du ThtAtre (1715) I, 126, 302.
5 Acte I, sc. 2.

350

LA CALPRENEDE DRAMATIST 63

Pousset de Montauban found it necessary in 1654 to turn Hermeni-
gilde into verse.1

Lives of the saints, while still forming a subject for the drama
in medieval survivals and in school plays, had been excluded from
the popular stage. In the forties quite a number of such subjects
were dramatized. Du Ryer had called attention by his Saul to the
possibilities of a play which used religion as an important motive.
Baro may have written his St. Eustache as early as 1639.2 Puget
de la Serre published in 1642 his Thomas Morus; in 1643 his Ste.
Catherine; Desfontaines, in 1643, his St. Eustache, his St. Alexis and
St. Genest in 1645. The chefs d'ceuvre of the school are undoubtedly
Rotrou's St. Genest and Corneille's Polyeucte. In the present state
of knowledge it is hard to make out the chronological order of these
pieces. Plays were usually represented from one to three years
before they were published, but it often happened that one play,
written before another, was printed after it. Hence we cannot tell
just what the importance of Hermenigilde is. It was published the
same year as Polyeucte, but until we know just when both plays were
represented no definite statement can be made as to which influenced
the other.

The ultimate source of the play lies hi historical events described
by Gregory of Tours.3 The Visigothic king, Leuvigildus, was an
Arrian, like his second wife, Goisunta, and his sons by his first
marriage, Hermenegildus and Richaredus. Ingundis, daughter of
the Frankish king and like her father, a Catholic, married Hermene-
gildus, but remained firm in her faith despite first the blandishments
and then the tortures of her husband's stepmother, who threw her
on the ground, trampled upon her, and had her plunged into a pond.
When she went with her husband to rule a Spanish province, she
converted him to Catholicism. Hearing of his father's anger at
this event, Hermenegildus turned to the Greek emporer for aid and
revolted against the king. Besieged, he was visited by his brother

1 Indtgonde (Paris: de Luine).

* In his Preface, published in 1649, he states that he has withheld publication
for ten years and now brings out the play to distinguish it from a piece by Desfontaines
that has the same name. But as the latter play was published in 1643, Baro may be
merely seeking to prove his play older than the other.

*Cf. Ren6 Poupardin, Grtgoire de Tours (Paris: Picard, 1913) especially Book V,
chap, xxviii, pp. 191, 192.

351

64 H. CARRINGTON LANCASTER

and promised safety if he would surrender, but when he had given
himself up, he was exiled and finally put to death.

The sixth-century Spanish chronicler, Johannes Biclarensis, tells
the story in much the same way,1 but he omits the name of the prince's
wife and says nothing of the persecution to which she was subjected
by her husband's stepmother. He adds the fact that Seville was the
city in which Hermenegildus was besieged. In neither account is
the prince represented as a martyr, though Gregory states that his
conversion caused his father's hostility. Gregory the Great, in his
Dialogi (iii), described the death of the prince and added miraculous
details, but he failed to mention the revolt, the efforts of Goisunta,
and the parley between the brothers. Subsequent accounts were
based chiefly on these sources. Some of them, Juan Vaseo,2 Paulus
Diaconus,3 and the Primer a Crdnica general* omit the relations
between the two princesses. Baronius5 quotes Gregory of Tours at
great length, adding information derived from Gregory the Great.
He does not give the name of the city where Hermenegildus was
besieged, but his reference to the Bishop of Seville, who, according
to Gregory the Great, converted the prince, may have suggested
that Seville was the city in question. Mariana6 gives a still more
complete account in which all the details I have mentioned are
repeated, the scene is laid in Seville, the martyrdom is emphasized,
and the various speeches are highly elaborated.

The ultimate source of La Calpren&Ie was, as I have said,
Gregory of Tours. His account of the relations existing between
the two princesses is too closely followed to allow of any other
interpretation. But Gregory's text is not enough to explain the
location in Seville and the emphasis placed upon the martyrdom.
I would therefore conclude that he derived the plot from an inter-
mediate source, Baronius, Mariana, or some other historian who
combined Gregory's account with details that are lacking there.7

« Espafia sagrada (Madrid: Antonio Marin, 1751), VI, 375, 381-85. Isidore ol
Seville, who devotes only eight words to the whole affair, is negligible as a source.
2 Rerum Hispanicarum Scriptores (Prancofurti: Wechelius, 1579), pp. 552-56.
8 Historia Langobardorum, Book III, chap. xxi.
4 Edited by Menendez Pidal (Madrid, 1906), pp. 260, 262.

* Annales Ecdesiastici (Lucae: Venturinus, 1741), X, 386, 387, 395, 396.

* Historia de Espafia, Book V, chap. xii. The Latin text, rather than the Spanish,
was probably used by La Calprenede.

* A friend has kindly suggested to me the probability of a Spanish play having
been the source of Hermenigilde. He argues that as plays dealing with saints were rare

352

LA CALPRENEDE DRAMATIST 65

When the play begins, the hero is besieged in Seville, a situation
similar to the opening scenes of la Mort de Mithridate and leanne
d'Angleterre. When his brother comes to offer him pardon, he
yields in order to avoid bloodshed, although he foresees his own
destruction. The king now debates as to what shall be done with
him. His daughter and second son beg him to keep his word, but
his wife urges him to condemn Hermenegildus as a traitor. The
arguments are repeated by subordinate characters. Hermenegildus,
in the third act, spurns the suggestion made by his brother and sister
that he give up his religion in order to win his pardon; in the fourth,
brought before his father, he defends himself at great length, but again
refuses to return to Arianism.1 His stepmother argues, as does
the king in Mariana's account, that his profession of Catholicism
is only a pretext for seeking to win the throne. Again pleas are made
for and against the execution, and the king agrees to spare him if he
will renounce his faith. The last act passes in prison. Ingundis,
like Polyeucte, puts love above self-interest, religion above either:
"Fayme Hermenigilde beaucoup plus que moy-mesme; mais i'ayme
mieux qu'il n'y ait plus d'Hermenigilde au monde pour moy, que

in France but common in Spain and as a Spanish saint is here in question Spanish influence
is "probable on a priori grounds." He then calls attention to three Spanish plays men-
tioned by La Barrera, la tragedia de San Hermenegildo, rey y mdrtir (p. 580), el Mdrtir y Rey
de Sevilla, San Hermenegildo 6 el Rey mas perfecto (p. 508), and El primer blason de Espafia,
San Hermenegildo (p. 187), and argues from the fact of their existence that La CalprenSde's
tragedy "may well have derived from some Spanish play existing or lost." These sug-
gestions are certainly worthy of careful study, but various considerations prevent my
accepting these conclusions. (1) The fact that a French author wrote about a foreign
saint does not make it necessary to assume that he drew his information from a work by
a compatriot of the saint. One would not suggest, for instance, that Puget de la Serre
based his Thomas Morus on an English play. (2) The influence of the comedia was
large in France, but various dramatists, Hardy, Du Ryer, Tristan, and others, escaped it.
(3) I find no evidence of Spanish influence on La CalprenSde's other plays. (4) Herme-
nigilde shows none of the supernatural elements commonly found in the comedia de santos.
Neither is the hero a king, as he is in at least two of the Spanish plays, nor does the play
show any influence of Spanish technique. (5) La CalprenSde could hardly have seen any
of the three Spanish plays mentioned. According to La Barrera, the last two are not
earlier than the second half of the seventeenth century. Of the first it is known only
that it was acted in a school at some time during the century. It is an extremely obscure
production and was probably never published nor acted by professionals. In order
therefore to conclude that La CalprenSde made use of a Spanish play, one must assume
that in the first half of the seventeenth century there existed a comedia so well known that
it passed into France and attracted the attention of this French dramatist, but that it
subsequently became so completely forgotten that not even its name is known today.
Such an occurrence is certainly far less probable that that La CalprenSde turned to a
Latin author such as Baronius or Mariana. Personally, I cannot accept a contrary
hypothesis, but I leave the reader to judge for himself.

1 In re-working the play, Montauban adds four judges, thus representing more com-
pletely the formal trial; cf. op. cit., Act III, scenes 1-3.

353

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66 H. CARRINGTON LANCASTER

s'il me restoit un Hermenigilde apostat." The hero again refuses
to give up his religion and is led away to execution. Ingundis has a
vision of his death, hears an account of it from an attendant, and

The first two acts follow the historical narrative closely enough,
but Ingundis, who was really left with the Greeks, is brought into
the action. A sister and Gothic noblemen are added. The second,
third, and fourth acts could easily be combined into one, for there
are frequent repetitions of argument. Resemblances to various plays
of the time occur. The king, who promises pardon to a rebel, then
breaks his word when the latter has surrendered, recalls Du Ryer's
Alcionee. The hostile stepmother appears again in Rotrou's Cosrods
and Corneille's Nicomede. As in Polyeucte, the subject is the mar-
tyrdom of a prince; the king hesitates like Felix, gives his son a last
chance to recant; there is a conflict between religion and ties of
close relationship. Finally, the play is much like la Mort des enfans
d'H&rodes, for a father puts his son to death, there is a trial in the
fourth act, the sentence is not immediately executed, the fifth act
passes in prison, where the victim's wife plays an important r61e.
The play possesses a good deal of pathos and a variety of characters,
but it lacks action and approaches closely La Calprenede's ideal
tragedy, a trial, followed by an execution. Indeed, La Calpren&de
appears to have had little more to say in dramatic form. Instead
of further repetition, he turned to the novel.

Toward the end of his life, however, he came back, like Corneille,
to the drama, writing Bellissaire for the Hotel de Bourgogne and
undertaking for Moli&re a play of unknown subject. For the former
work he chose a theme that had already been dramatized by Rotrou
and Desfontaines. It was never published, though it probably
remained in the repertory of the H6tel de Bourgogne for a score of
years.1 Its first appearance there is noted in the following lines from
Loret's journal2 of July 12, 1659:

Pour voir, en Tragi-Come'die,
Une Piece grave et hardie,

i It certainly did so if I am correct in concluding that this is the play alluded to on
folio 83 verso of the Memoir e de Mahelot et de Laurent, Bibliothfeque Nationale, MS
24330, fonds francais.

* La Muze hiatorique (ed. Livet; Paris: Daffls, 1878), III. 78.

354

LA CALPREN£DE DRAMATIST 67

Dont le sujet soit signale",
Extr&nement bien d&nele",
Et digne de ravir et plaire,
II faut voir le Grand Bellissaire
Que les sieurs Acteurs de l'H6tel
Tiennent d'un Auteur immortel,
Sc.avoir le fameux Calprene"de,
Pi£ce, sans mentir, qui ne ce"de
Aux Ouvrages les plus parfaits
Que depuis dix ans on ait faits,
Piece, entre les plus me'morables,
Qui contient des Vers admirables,
Pie"ce valant mille e"cus d'or,
Et dans laquelle Floridor,
Qui de grace et d'esprit abonde
A le plus beau rolle du Monde.

IV. A GENERAL CRITICISM

La Calpren&de's contribution to seventeenth-century drama lies
in the fact that, in the first place, he aided the development of
the classical system; in the second, he represented more than any-
one else certain interesting, but ephemeral tendencies. His work
belongs chiefly to the seven or eight years preceding Polyeucte, when
the classical formulas were being worked out. He was one of
Corneille's numerous rivals in playwriting, but as he began to
produce later than most of these he often appears less original than
they. At first he felt his way, beginning with a tragedy that showed
considerable talent and with two tragi-comedies. Coming apparently
under the influence of Tristan, courtier and adventurer like himself,
he was brought back to historical tragedy and, whether by contact
with Englishmen at court or by the study of Montchrestien's
Ecossaise, he, first of his generation, turned to the modern field.
In leanne d'Angleterre he first expressed his peculiar notion of a
tragedy. In Essex he produced his chef d'oauvre. He continued
to experiment but not to improve, and finally turned to the novel,
where he met with his chief success.

Classical concentration is obvious in most of his plays. Except
in the two early tragi-comedies, where unity of time is slightly
violated, all the plays observe the twenty-four-hour rule. The

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68 H. HARRINGTON LANCASTER

place in these tragi-comedies and in Phalante includes a city and
a forest at some distance from it. In his first tragedy and his last ,
places within a town and immediately outside it are represented.
Elsewhere the unity is that of a few houses in a city. The chief
violations of the unity of action are also in the early tragi-comedies,
where a deus ex machind appears. In the other plays violations are
slight, consisting chiefly of repetitions or unnecessary amplifications,
for now and then he plans his play in such a manner that without
resorting to like devices he would not have enough material to fill
five acts.

In the development of the psychological struggle also La Cal-
prenede plays a part. Nowhere does he go so far as Corneille did
in the Cid, but there is in each play a struggle, which often fills the
most important scenes. The role of Elizabeth is especially note-
worthy in this respect. It is doubtful, however, whether La
Calpren&de realized the full significance of a character like hers, for
he usually emphasizes the pathetic victim rather than the person
who has the power to choose — Mithridates rather than his son;
Lady Jane rather than Mary; Herod's sons rather than Herod
himself; Hermenigildus rather than his father. But in any case it
is the mental states of the persons that interest him, instead of the
duels, battles, recognitions, and disguises that might have been
expected from the author whose novels are largely remembered for
the redoubtable sword thrusts described by Madame de SeVigne1.1
However strange it may seem, the only examples of dueling are in
Bradamante and Phalante. The executions which conclude four of
his tragedies are not represented on the stage. Nothing like the
spectacular scene at the end of his Mithridate is found in his later
tragedies. He also joins Corneille, Rotrou, and Tristan in the
emphasis he places on blood kinship or other close relationship as
a means of heightening tragic effect. A father is betrayed by his
son. Sons are put to death by their fathers. A queen condemns
her lover.

The characters are aristocratic. In every play there is a king or
queen. Conspiracy, real or imaginary, against the government and
the punishment of it are the principal themes. Usually the victim

* Lettrea ("Grands Ecrivains" ed.; Paris: Hachette, 1862), II, 270.

356

LA CALPRENEDE DRAMATIST

is partly to blame for his fate. This is clearly true of Essex. Even
Hermenigildus, whatever be his motives, has conspired against his
father and called in foreign aid. Though La Calpren&de was far
less than Corneille a dramatizer of the will, certain of his characters
would not be out of place among the latter 's uncompromising heroes:
Mithridates and Berenice, who die rather than yield to the Romans;
Elizabeth, who sacrifices her lover to reasons of state; Elips, who
prefers suicide to dishonor; Hermenigildus, for whom religion has the
same importance it has for Polyeucte.

In these and other respects La Calprenede reinforces the classical
tradition. He shows his individuality in the emphasis he places
on the modern or late medieval subject and the formal trial. For
the sources of his first three plays he went to well-known authors,
Plutarch, Ariosto, and, perhaps, the late Greek novelists. Then,
discovering the value of recent English history, he wrote leanne
d'Angleterre, Essex, and Edouard. In sixteenth-century tragedy a
few examples of the modern subject can be found,1 but Hardy left
no record of similar usage except that certain of his tragi-comedies
contain plots from modern fiction. Mairet dramatized a modern
subject in his Soliman, represented in 1635 or 1636, but even in
Racine's day the Turkish theme was not considered a violation of the
rule for tloignement. If, then, we may judge by dates of publication,
leanne d'Angleterre is the first play of the period based on an event
in modern history. It was followed by several pieces that have to
do with incidents of the fifteenth or sixteenth century,2 but La Cal-
pren&de failed to exert any permanent influence in this direction.
It was not till the eighteenth century that writers of tragedy turned
to any extent to this field. During the Romantic period Stendhal8
demanded subjects from Gregory of Tours, Froissart, Livy, the
Bible, and modern Greek history — a program that, unknown to him,
had been almost carried out by La Calprenede in the midst of the
classical period.

i Philanire, femme d'Hy polite and I'Ecossaise, for example.

zRegnier, Marie Stuard, (1639); d' Aubignac, la Pucelle d'Orleans (1642); Puget
de la serre, Thomas Morus (1642); Mareschal, Charles le Hardy (1646).

» Cited by M. Doumic in Petit de Julleville's Histoire de la langue et de la literature
francaise, VII, 364.

357

70 H. CAERINGTON LANCASTER

The second mark of individuality is the development of the
formal trial as a dramatic device. There was nothing novel in this
idea, for it was already known to the Greeks. Aeschylus in the
Eumenides1 and Aristophanes in the Wasps2 had represented judges,
defendants, and prosecutors. Hardy had used the formal trial in a
number of cases.3 The most interesting of these are the trials of
Coriolanus and of Gesippe by the Roman senate. In other cases
there is a single judge, as later in Hermenigilde. Hardy probably
had no theory with regard to the trial, but he found examples of it
in the themes from ancient history that he treated and saw in them
the dramatic values of conflict and suspense. As the early plays of
the generation that followed Hardy's were little concerned with
ancient subjects, the more democratic judges were usually replaced
by the ruler, as in Du Ryer's Aretaphile, but when ancient themes
came back into vogue the judges reappear, as in Tristan's Mariane.

In none of these plays, however, was the trial highly developed.
La CalprenSde, after showing a marked interest in decisions reached
after argument or combat, represented a formal trial with consider-
able detail in his Jeanne d'Angleterre, and at still greater length in
Essex. Trials occur again in Edouard, la Mort des enfans d'Herodes,
and, to a certain extent, in Hermenigilde. According to this system,
the ideal tragedy shows an arrest toward the end of the first act,
followed by scenes of preparation for a trial that takes place in the
third or fourth act. The victim appears in the opening scenes of
the fifth act and is led away to be executed behind the scenes. The
news is brought to someone deeply interested in the event and
comment of some sort ends the play. In leanne the chancellor an-
nounces that the trial will be before the barons. The accused raises
legal points and his judges answer them. In Essex the whole of
the third act is devoted to the trial. Again the court is composed of
English lords and the accused brings charges against them. Evidence
for the prosecution is brought forward and an attempt is made to
diminish its importance. Finally the presiding official sentences the
accused. In Edouard the king presides and the judges reach no

*89iff.

» Scedate, Act V; Achille, Act II, scene 3; Coriolan, I, 2; V, 2; Marianne, IV, 2;
Oeaippe, V, 1; Ravissement de Proserpine, V, last scene; TimocUe, V, last scene.

358

LA CALPRENEDE DRAMATIST

decision. In la Mori des enfans d' Her odes Herod both presides and
prosecutes. His sons speak in their defense and Glaphira is called
in to testify. Finally in Hermenigilde the hero defends himself at
length before his father, who offers him the opportunity to give up
his religion and, when he refuses, condemns him to death.

It is worthy of note that the dramatist who paid most attention
to the formal trial was not himself a lawyer, as were his contem-
poraries, Corneille, Du Ryer, Rotrou, Auvray, Rayssiguier. Per-
haps the drama of the law appealed to him with greater force on this
account. But it is doubtful whether it appealed so much to his
audience. D'Aubignac finds that it has ceased to interest the public
of the fifties. He explains this fact as follows:1

Personne n'a presque jamais approuv6 les Conseils & les Jugemens de
Criminels, que nous y voyons neanmoins assez frequemment, parce que
c'est une simple Deliberation: & bien que 1' Accuse", qui d'ordinaire est le
Heros de la Pie"ce, agisse par inter£t & avec effort, nous voyons neanmoins
que le Theatre languit, si-tot qu' il est question de juger: La raison est que
ceux qui restent, quand ce personnage s'est eloigne*, sont ordinairement de
mauvais Acteurs, tous assis, & partant sans action; recitant deux ou trois
mauvais vers, & qu' on ne peut faire gueres meilleurs en cette rencontre:
& des gens encore qui sans inter£t suivent par lachete* les volontez d'un
Tyran.

In the novel La Calprenede's talent found freer expression.
The emphasis that he there places upon incident recalls his tragi-
comedies rather than his more serious plays. Such physical combats
as he had already depicted in his early tragi-comedies and Phalante
can be matched by numerous passages in his novels. But the pre-
dominating psychological interest of his tragedies is echoed also in
the story of Cleone,2 which has been called a forerunner of the
Princesse de Cttves* Evidence of hasty composition, lack of variety
in his incidents, and concentration in place and time, which I have
pointed out in discussing his plays, reappear in his novels. But in
writing these he could concern himself less than in his plays with the
motives that lay behind his incidents or the order in which his events
were arranged. Much was said a generation ago about the repressive

» Op. cit., II. 287.

* Catsandre, Part IV, Book II, chap. vi.

• Of. Lefranc, Revue des Cours et Conferences, XIV, 583.

359

72 H. CARRINGTON LANCASTER

effect of classical regulation upon Corneille, but, as a matter of
fact, the rules rather sustained him in his effort to substitute the
study of states of mind for something of less importance. La
Calprenede tried to do the same thing, and several of his plays show
how nearly he came to succeeding, but, lacking both seriousness
of purpose, thanks to the aristocratic disdain he felt toward his
profession, and versatility of imagination, he was able neither to
extract from his subjects all that was in them nor to vary his treat-
ment nor to give his characters effective expression. Hence the
difference between his relative rank among the dramatists and among
the novelists of his day. If we divide the former into classes he
would not be put higher than the third, for he is inferior not only
to Corneille but to Mairet, Rotrou, Du Ryer, and Tristan. As a
novelist, on the other hand, he was placed by his contemporaries
with Mile de Scudery at the head of the list.

H. CARRINGTON LANCASTER
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

360

CORNEILLE'S EARLY FRIENDS AND SURROUNDINGS

The literature of the seventeenth century is, in general, of little
value for revelations of a personal nature about the authors of the
time, since it favors the abstract, the general, the typical rather
than the particular. The "honnestes gens" — and what seventeenth
century French author did not aspire to be classified among them ? —
inclined to be reticent about their private life. They considered it
bad form to display too much of their intimate existence to the
indiscreet gaze of the crowd. A significant illustration of this state
of mind is that Pascal condemned Montaigne for his unrestrained
indulgence in self-revelation. Imbued with the conceptions of his
day, Corneille possessed to a high degree this aristocratic reserve
about his personal feelings and adventures. With the exception of
a few scattered lines, for instance, in his Excuse d Ariste, he hardly
ever referred directly to his "ego." To reconstruct his surroundings,
to gather facts about his life, we have had to rely chiefly upon the
doubtful anecdotes of the Ana, echoes of the gossip of the day;
recently the valuable researches of Taschereau, Gosselin, Bouquet;
and more recently still those of G. Dubosc, C. Searles and W. A.
Nitze have revealed new aspects of Corneille or unknown Cornelian
documents, and have disposed of some picturesque legends and
unwarranted assertions.

Yet Corneille's formative years, when he was a student, a youth-
ful lawyer, and a pleasure-loving rhymer at Rouen, have remained
comparatively dim and unexplained. He has been depicted, at his
de"but, as a young man without poetical training, isolated in his
province, as one who, incited solely by the magic spur of love, pro-
duced his early poems and plays. The critics credited him with but
slight literary culture and persuaded themselves that his inborn
genius was sufficient to foster his talent in spite of his isolation and
his supposedly unfavorable surroundings.

Sainte-Beuve, in contradiction here with his general views, con-
ceived Corneille's genius as a kind of spontaneous blossoming,

361] 73 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, November, 1920

74 GUSTAJPE L. VAN ROOSBROECK

altogether independent of his surroundings, and he may be taken
as representative. He declared that Corneille's was "a genius by
instinct, personal and free of movement."1 Nisard wrote: "No
writer has merited more than Corneille the title of creative genius.
He is unique in the history of literature by the prodigious distance
which separates him from those who immediately preceded him.
. . . . An abyss separates Corneille from all that can be called

dramatic production before him Descartes created the method

and only purified the language. Corneille created both the language
and the method."2

But is it not more logical to claim for Corneille no exceptional
evolution, to conceive the flowering of his talent as due, at least in
part, to the intellectual atmosphere of his native city, to the books
he read, to the friends he made, and to the plays he saw represented
there? Genius, although not entirely dependent upon its environ-
ment, is modeled by it and developed in certain directions; it uses
the humbler material of its daily life in the building of masterpieces.
Has Corneille been a fortuitous exception to this rule ?

The root of the conception of his genius as "free and independent,"
as blossoming forth without preparation, lies in a too literal inter-
pretation of Fontennelle's anecdote, which no modern historian
accepts at its face value : Pierre Corneille was suddenly transformed
into a playwright by his love for a Rouen girl, the Melite of his first
work. We cannot doubt that his amorous feelings were the occasion
for the first important expression of his talent — Corneille said, "Love
taught me to rime" — but it is certainly not its origin. Without a
certain mastery of verse-technique and of vocabulary, and, in a
measure, of stagecraft, all of which presuppose an adequate knowledge
of contemporary French literature, he could not have written even
such a work as Melite. Corneille was thrown upon his own resources
in acquiring mastery of his mother-tongue, for the Jesuits of the
time, in whose school at Rouen he was educated, employed only
Latin and ignored the vernacular.3

* Portraits litteraires. I: P. Corneille.

* Histoire de la Litterature francaise, II, 87-88.

»Cf. "Ratio atque institutio studiorum Societatis Jesu," in G. Compayrfi's Hittoir*
critique des doctrines de I' Education en France, I (1879), 167.

362

CORNEILLE'S EARLY FRIENDS AND SURROUNDINGS 75

In the past the critics have conceived Paris as the only outstand-
ing literary milieu in the France of the time: this it became only
decades later; Rouen has been regarded as a provincial town where
literature received but scant attention. A more attentive study
of Corneille's early surroundings reveals the fact that, in the first
decades of the seventeenth century, Rouen was as favorable a literary
milieu as was the capital. Corneille found there in abundance all
that could give impulse to his early poetic endeavors and guide them
toward the fervid art of his masterpieces: books and friends who
incited his talent with the sympathy of common interests. His
early work reveals serious preparation in language, verse-technique,
and, relatively speaking, in stagecraft. He was well acquainted
with the literary fashions of the day, and even so early a work as
Mtlite shows unmistakable traces of the literature of the time.1 His
early achievements are due less to a sudden flare of genius, kindled
by love, than to his environment, which happily nurtured his poetical
gifts. This literary and linguistic training he must have acquired
by his own efforts and at Rouen, for there is no evidence and little
likelihood that he ever visited Paris before 1630 or the beginning of
1631, when Mtlite was played there.

The present article proposes to give some information about
Corneille's early friends who created the literary atmosphere in which
his talent unfolded, and to point out some facts about his surroundings
which must have stimulated his early literary endeavors.

His first interest in the theater may have been awakened in the
young Corneille by the plays which were probably performed in the
"Jeu de Paume" which bordered the courtyard of his father's house
in the Rue de la Pie.2 It is known that in later years troupes of
actors made use of this inclosure for dramatic representations, and,
since it is generally accepted that the companies of Valleran and

1 Of . my article in Modern Philology, XVII, 141: "A Commonplace in Corneille's

Mtlite."

2 Registres du Tabellionage de Rouen. The property of the Corneilles was composed
of "plusieurs corps et tenements de maisons ... born6s, d'un bout, par devant, le pavfi du
roy, en la rue de la Pie, et d'autre bout, par derriSre, le jeu de paume de St. Eustache."
Of. Ballin "Extraits d'actes de vente relatifs aux maisons de Pierre et de Thomas
Corneille," Revue de Rouen (1863), p. 241; and G. Dubosc, Trois Normanda, pp. 43-44.

363

76 GUSTATE L. VAN RoOSBROECK

Lenoir-Mondory visited Rouen before 1630, it is at least possible that
the young Corneille was drawn to the stage by the impressions
gathered in the popular theater of his own neighborhood.

There is no evidence that before 1630 Rouen possessed any
important literary circles, any "salons" after the fashion of the famous
contemporary Parisian drawing-rooms, but the interest in literature
was very lively and general. To be convinced of this one has only
to examine the accounts of the annual poetic contests, the "Puys de
PImmacule'e Conception," which mention a great number of the
poets of Rouen, authors of weak and edifying verse in honor of the
Virgin. Besides this, some of the fellow-citizens of the young
Corneille had theatrical ambitions. In this respect Rouen may be
said to represent the general state of Normandy in the early decades
of the seventeenth century, when this province took the leadership
of France in literary production. Bertaut, Malherbe, Vauquelin de
la Fresnaye, Pradon, Benserade, des Yvetaux, Boisrobert, d'Ouville,
St.-Amand, de Marbeuf, Huet, de Scudery, Montchrestien, Bre"beuf,
were all Normans, as were also some lesser lights, as the two J. Auv-
rays, J. Behourt, P. Brinon, David Ferrand, du Hamel, Courval-
Sonnet, J. Hays, de Meliglosse, Nicolas de Montreux, P. Troterel,
and others. At the same time Rouen was an important printing
center where all the valuable works of the period were published
or republished. This means that Corneille in his early years had a
great abundance of reading matter within his reach: plays, novels,
popular pamphlets, manuals of gallantry, etc. He himself has left
a few indications as to the authors he had read before or about the
time of M elite, but he mentions only "feu Hardy et quelques mod-
ernes," and Ronsard, Malherbe, and The'ophile.1 There is, besides,
a reference to the Chevalier Marin, in the Gallerie du Palais. It is,
however, hazardous to conclude from this, as does Sainte-Beuve,
that "Ronsard, Malherbe, The'ophile et Hardy composaient done a
peu pres toute sa litte*rature moderne" (op. cit., I, 34). It is unlikely
that Corneille neglected the nearly complete library of the literature of
his time printed in Rouen by Raphael and David du Petit- Val,
Abraham Cousturier, Jean Petit, Theodore Reinsart, Jean Osmont,
and others. From about 1624 to about 1629, generally considered

1 Examen de Milite, 1660; Au Lecteur, Mttite, 1633.

364

CORNEILLE'S EARLY FRIENDS AND SURROUNDINGS 77

the formative period of his talent, he must have visited the law
courts, although he probably never tried a case. In the galleries
of this building were the booksellers' stalls and hardly any new pub-
lication shown there could have escaped his attention, the more so
since David du Petit- Val, the most important Rouen publisher of
plays and verse, was his friend and composed a sonnet in his praise.
This sonnet is found among the laudatory poems in the first edition
of La Veuve:

Saint Amant, ne crains plus d'avouer ta patrie,
Puisque ce Dieu des vers est n6 dans la Neustrie,
Qui pour se rendre illustre a la post6rit6,

Accomplit en nos jours 1'mcroyable merveille

De cet oiseau fameux parmi 1'antiquite*,

Nous donnant un Phe*nix sous le nom de Corneille.1

Both Raphael and David du Petit- Val devoted much attention
to the printing of plays: they became, with Abel Langelier and
Toussainct de Bray of Paris, the leading publishers of plays in the
early seventeenth century. From their presses came "receuils" of
tragedies, besides works by Larivey, Robert Gamier, Jacques
GreVin, Jean de la Pe*ruse, Le Jars, and others. They published
nearly all the works of P. Troterel, sieur d'Aves, some of those of
Hardy, and a number of pastoral plays. They also took a leading
part in the publication of verse. Besides the volumes of du Bellay,
Philippe Desportes, and others, they printed important "receuils"
of poems of the best-known authors of the time. In the first edition
of the fourth volume of his Theatre, Hardy praised their care and
accuracy, and expressed his discontent at the negligence of his
former Parisian publisher, Jacques Quesnel: "Je donne un droit de
primogeniture contre Pordre a ce dernier volume ... veu que les
pre"ce"dents me font rougir de la honte des Imprimeurs, ausquels
1'avarice fist trahir ma reputation, estans si pleins de fautes, tant &

1 Marty-Laveaux, I, 386. Du Petit- Val, no doubt, refers to the following verses

of Saint- Amant:

Cher compatriote de Latre,

Humeur que mon ame idolatre,

Homme a tout faire, esprit charmant,

Pour qui j'avoue estre Normant (La Vigne, 1627).

This de Latre, or de Lastre, who published some poems in the Cabinet des Mute* of 1619
and was crowned several times at the Palinods, was the maternal grandfather of Pradon.

78 GUSTAVE L. VAN ROOSBROECK

Porthographe qu'aus vers que je voudrois en pouvoir effacer jusques
a la me*moire. Au regard du dernier, un imprimeur digne de sa pro-
fession te le rend, Amy Lecteur ... aussi correct que le peut souffrir
la presse. ... Car jac.oit que Paris excelle en nombre d'limprimeurs
qui ne le cedent & aucuns de PEurope; cela n'empesche que beaucoup
de passevolants se rencontrent parmy leurs vieilles bandes. Et de
ma part j'aime mieux que mon livre ... soit bien imprime* & Rouen
que mal a Paris."1

Besides these two excellent publishers — the two du Petit- Vals —
A. Cousturier, Jean Petit, Jean Osmont, Claude Le Villain, and
others, published the younger writers and new editions of the older
masters. They follow in curious contrast: Remy Belleau and
The"ophile at the same time as the tragedies of Jean Behourt; the
tragedies and pastoral plays of Nicolas Chrestien, sieur des Croix,
together with the translations of Buchanan's tragedies by Pierre
de Brinon, Montchrestien's works, the Iris of Coigne*e de Bourron,
the theater of Hardy, and the Guerrier Repenty of Jacques Le Clerq.
Gamier 's works number twenty-one editions at Rouen from 1596
to 1618. Works of Mairet are printed by the side of those of Denis
Coppe"e, "bourgeois de Huy," and of A. Gautier, "Apotiquaire
Avranchois."

The Rouen publications from 1600-1630 show a motley confusion
of styles and literary tendencies : it was a groping period, preparing
the classical age. Pastoral plays, tragedies, tragi-comedies, were
printed there in greater numbers than anywhere else in France at
that time. Abraham Cousturier published a whole series of plays,
popular in tone, reminding one of the morality plays, without names
of authors or dates. They probably constituted the current reper-
tory of the wandering comedians who periodically visited Rouen.2

1 CEuvres de Hardy, ed. Stengel, IV, Au Lecteur.

• Rouen was their" ordinaire s6 jour" (Bruscambille, cited by Rigal, A. Hardy,^. 118).
Ohappuzeau (Le Theatre Francois, p. 112) says of the troupe of the Marais: "Cette
troupe alloit quelquefois passer I'EstS a Rouen." On January 26, 1623, the Parlement
forbade a troupe of comedians to play, either in the open air or in private houses, because
of the plague. On July 23, 1629, farces played by sellers of medicine were forbidden.
Of. N. Periaux, Histoire de la ville de Rouen, p. 421. Gaultier Garguille played at Rouen
(Of. Revue de la Normandie, 30 avril, 1862). In the colleges of Rouen a number of
tragedies, pastoral plays, and tragi-comedies were staged in the early decades of the
seventeenth century. Of. V. Pournel, Curioaitea theatralea anciennes et modernes, p. 75,
and Boysse, Le Theatre dea Jesuitea,

366

COENEILLE'S EARLY FRIENDS AND SURROUNDINGS 79

Popular and farcical literature was abundantly printed. The novels
and stories offer us the names of Camus, Jacques Yver, Be>oalde de
Verville, Marguerite de Navarre, des Escuteaux, de Belleforest,
Honore" d'Urfe", Bonaventure Desperiers, Sorel, Frangois de Rosset,
and of a number of lesser lights. Poetry was represented by the
important "receuils" of du Petit- Val and by editions of Du Bellay,
Louise Labe*, Ronsard, The*ophile, Regnier, Mellin de Sainct-Gelais,
Desportes, Ole*nix de Mont Sacre*, Courval-Sonnet, and others,
and by the local muses of J. Grisel, P. de Marbeuf, J. Auvray and
others. Not the least interesting are the manuals of amorous dis-
course and refined manners in the style of the Predeux. Trans-
lations from the Italian, Spanish, and Latin, as well as original
works in these languages, are found. Works of devotion, historical
treatises and descriptions of travels abound, but their number cannot
compare with that of the Recueils de chansons or with the amusing
and frequently obscene soliloquies, satirical productions in the
grotesque manner of Bruscambille and Gaultier Garguille, in which
the sly Normans of the time took delight.1

It is not astonishing that, in a city where literature was so
abundant and varied, a number of writers, more productive than
talented in many cases, should have flourished. Their forgotten
labor has not been in vain: their toying with verse or their sincere
interest in literature created an atmosphere which stimulated the
budding genius of the young Corneille.

When, in 1634, Corneille published his play La Veuve under the
patronage of the well-known Parisian bookseller Frangois Targa,
several contemporary poets bestowed upon him high praise in verse :
this is printed in the first edition. Clamorous Georges de Scude"ry
opened this concert of hyperbolic homage with his famous line:
"Le soleil s'est leve, retirez vous, e*toiles," a prophetic utterance which

1 Marsan, La Pastorale dramatiquc, p. 275, indicates the importance of the Rouen
printing shops at that epoch: " Le Catalogue Soleinne nous en donne une preuve materielle.
De 1568 8, 1600, sur 64 numeros environ (les Editions de Gamier mises a part) 6 seulement
fitaient imprimis ft Rouen, contre 12 & Lyon et 24 & Paris. De 1600 a 1620, sur 104
numgros, Lyon n'en compte plus que 8, Paris que 31, tandis que Rouen s'616ve a 48.
Ces chiffres, sans doute, n'ont pas une valeur absolue, mais la proportion, au moins,
est & retenir." In 1579 there were installed at Rouen 26 " Maltres-imprimeurs et Li-
braires." In 1601 they numbered 40. On May 16, 1615, the Parlement decreed that
printers' apprentices should know Latin. From that date the printers were educated
men. Of. E. Gosselin, Simples notes sur les Imprimeurs et Libraires Rouennais, Rouen,

367

80 GUSTAVE L. VAN ROOSBROECK

he must have regretted a few years later, when, at the time of the
Cid, his words came true. Jean de Mairet followed with an epigram,
and Rotrou contributed a long Ode to this collection of conven-
tional parlor-poetry. Boisrobert and his brother d'Ouville sang,
more or less sincerely, the praise of their fellow-citizen.1 Claveret
also sent in two gems of his muse in eulogy of his future rival.

Besides these playwrights, the literary celebrities of the day,
a few minor and now almost forgotten poets of Normandy paid their
tribute to the rising glory of the young Corneille: J. Collardeau,
du Petit- Val, and de Marbeuf . Since they belong among the personal
acquaintances and literary associates of Corneille, some informa-
tion about them is given here.

J. COLLARDEAU

Marty-Laveaux (I, 386) remarks: "Julien Collardeau, procureur
du roi a Fontenay-le-Comte (Poitou), auteur de diverses poesies
latines et f ranc.aises et notamment de quatre petits poemes intitules :
Tableaux des victoires du Roi, Paris, J. Quesnel, 1630." This informa-
tion may be supplemented as follows: In 1629 he sent a Pindaric ode
to Bertrand de Vignolles, printed in a modern edition of the latter's
Memoir es. He published, in 1635, a sonnet in honor of Richelieu,
in the anthology Le Sacrifice des Muses au grand Cardinal de Richelieu,
and, about 1643, La description de Richelieu: A la memoire du Cardinal.
He was highly praised by Balzac, in 1646, both as a prose writer and
as a poet, and by Chapelain, in 1661; with the latter he corresponded
at that date about a volume of verse, Les saintes metamorphoses,
which was then ready for the printer but does not seem to have
been published. He was born at Fontenay-le-Comte and died there
on March 20, 1669.2

» Boisrobert and his brother d'Ouville were residing at Rouen in 1634, when La Veuve
was published: they too wrote poems in Corneille's praise. Boisrobert, at that time
temporarily exiled from the court, was canon of the Cathedral of Rouen. The Afercure
de Gaillon (printed at the chateau of the Archbishop de Harlay) contains a "Lettre de
I'Erninentissime Cardinal due de Richelieu au religiossime archevesque de Rouen,"
dated January 31, 1634, beginning: "Ayant sceu par le sieur de Boisrobert." The
document proves that Boisrobert wrote to Richelieu from Rouen. A letter from Balzac
(CEuvres, I [1665], 444) shows that Boisrobert was at Rouen in May, 1634. The
"achevSd'imprimer" of La Veuve is dated May 13, 1634. Cf. also Goujet, XVII, 69,
and Magne, Le plaisant abbe de Boisrobert, chap. i.

«Of. Memoires de Bertrand de Vignolles, "Collection Meridionale," I (1869), 27-31;
Dreux du Radier, Bibliotheque du Poitou, III, 473; Goujet, XVI, 24; Lachevre, Bibl. des
Receuils coll., I, 147; (Euvres de Balzac, I, 530, 552; Lettres de Chapelain, II, 122, 231.

CORNEILLE'S EARLY FRIENDS AND SURROUNDINGS 81

PIERRE DE MARBEUF

Pierre de Marbeuf, sieur de Sahurs et d'Imare, is well known as a
minor poet who had his hour of ephemeral celebrity. He was born
about 1596, probably near Pont de TArche, in Normandy, where his
father was for a time "maltre des eaux et des forests." This function
may have brought the Marbeufs into relation with the Corneilles.
In 1625 his parents resided at Rouen. He seems to have lived for
short periods in various parts of France. He left Rouen early for
fear of the plague which at that time devastated the city, and estab-
lished himself in Anjou. Thence he went to Orleans (1619), but
must have paid frequent visits to Paris, since at that date he con-
fesses he is in love with a Parisian girl. For her he seems to have
given up his studies: "Le de*sir de luy plaire me fit perdre mes
premieres estudes," he says. Later he is found in Lorraine and in
Savoie. Notwithstanding his travels, he spent a good deal of time at
Rouen, for he was crowned at the Palinod in 1617, 1618, and 1620,
and he participated in this annual poetic competition in at least
two other years. His "stances" entitled Anatomie de I'oeil (1617)
brought him great renown. On various occasions he was the guest
of the Archbishop Francois de Harlay at his Chateau de Gaillon.
The date of his death is unknown, but it must be placed after 1644,
for in that year he contributed a sonnet to the Mercure de Gaillon
ou Receuil de Pieces Curieuses, celebrating the magnificence of the
archbishop's residence. Some of his publications were: poems
presented at the Palinods of Rouen, where some of them received
prizes; Psalterion Chrestien, par Pierre de Marbeuf, sieur d'Imare,
Rouen, 1618, followed by Poesies meslees du mesme autheur; Oeuvres
poetiques du sieur de Marbeuf sur Vheureux manage de leurs altesses
de Savoie, Paris and Rouen, 1619; Receuil des vers de M. de Marbeuf,
sieur de Sahurs, Rouen, 1628, with Epigrammata Latine; Le Portrait
de I'homme d'Estat, Ode (Paris, 1633), reprinted in the Sacrifice des
Muses au Grand Cardinal de Richelieu, 1635; a sonnet in the Mercure
de Gaillon, 1644.1

1 Of. de Duranville, "Le poSte Pierre de Marbeuf," Annales de I'Acad. de Rouen,
1873-74; Paul Olivier, Cent Poetes Lyriques, Precieux ou Burlesques au 17e Siecle, p. 70;
de Beaurepaire, Let Puyt de Palinod de Rouen et de Caen, pp. 152-57; A. Guiot, Troit
eiecles Palinodiques; Lachevre, op. cit., I, 236, 381; IV, 149; Biogr. Didot, XXXIII.

82 GUSTAVE L. VAN ROOSBROECK

DU PETIT-VAL

Marty-Laveaux (I, 387) attributes the sonnet of La Veuve to
Raphael du Petit- Val, printer and poet at Rouen, who composed some
verses in praise of Beroalde de Verville. But the author of this
poem must have been his son David, since Raphael, the father, died
on January 5, 1614, and was buried in the "Eglise du Prieure* de
St L6," in the side-chapel reserved for printers and booksellers.
The anthology Le Cabinet des Muses of 1619 contains an fipitaphe
de Raph. du Petit Val" His name appeared, however, upon books
from his printing shop till about 1624. This is explained by the
fact that his son David had not secured his license as "maitre impri-
meur" before that date.

David du Petit-Val also wrote poetry and was crowned nine
times at the Palinods, from 1623 to 1633. The poem he sent to
Corneille for La Veuve is a sonnet, a form which he preferred, as J. A.
Guiot testifies in his Trois Siecles Palinodiques (II, 160) : "Le sonnet
parait 6tre le genre auquel il s'attache et dans lequel il re"ussit souvent
au Puy de la Conception en 1625 et anne*es suivantes." This friend
of Corneille was, like his father, versed in Italian and even wrote
verses in that language. In 1624 he was crowned by the judges of
the Palinod for a sonnet in Italian dedicated to the Archbishop de
Harlay.1

The first edition of La Veuve also contained fourteen poems
signed only with initials or by unidentified authors. I will endeavor
to identify most of them, with the intention of throwing light on the
early literary acquaintances of Corneille.2 They were his friends

1 Cf. Fr&re, Manuel du bibliographe Normand.

»Picot, in his Bibliographic Cornelienne, p. 51, prints "sous toutes reserves" a note
of P. Lacroix on possible identifications of the anonymous authors who contributed
poems in praise of La Veuve: "23 pp. sont occupSes par des vers que divers auteurs
adressent a Corneille au sujet de sa pifece. Ces horamages sont au nombre de 26. Ils
sont sign§s de Scud6ry, Mairet, Gue'rente, I.G.A.E.P. (Jacques Gaillard, avocat en
Parlement), de Rotrou, C.B. (Charles Beys), Du Ryer, Boisrobert, d'OuvUle, Claveret,
J. Collardeau, L.M.P. (Louis Mauduit, Parisien), du Petit-Val, Pillastre, de Marbeuf,
de Canon, L.N. (Louis Neufgermain ou L. Nondon, auteur de la tragSdie de Cyrus),
Burnel, Marcel, Voille, Beaulieu, et A.C. (A. Chappelain ou Adam Campigny, pogtes
cit&s en 1633 et 1634)." P. Lacroix has forgotten one of the poems, the one contributed
by Villeneuve. He tries to identify only five unknown contributors out of fifteen and does
not prove that Corneille had any relations with the poets whose names he gives. The
author of the present article agrees with two attributions: C.B. =Charles Beys and
L.M.P. - Louis Mauduit, Parisien, identifications made before Lacroix by Goujet (Bibl.
Franc.).

370

CORNEILLE'S EARLY FRIENDS AND SURROUNDINGS 83

at Rouen, not Parisian celebrities, and their eulogy must have been
more sincere, their sympathy less feigned, their influence upon
Corneille more direct. Their compliments were not offered so
much in anticipation of reciprocal praise as was the case with the
de Scude*rys and the Claverets, who had been or expected to be
praised in their turn by Corneille and compared to the immortal
singers of antiquity. The following are the signatures of the several
poets by names or initials: GUERENTE. — I.G.A.E.P. — C.B. — L.M.P. —
PILLASTRE, avocat en Parlement. — VILLENEUVE. — DE CANON. —

L.N. — BURNEL. — MARCEL. — VOILLE. — BEAULIEU. — A.C.

GUlSRENTE

This poet was Jean Gue"rente, physician at Rouen, descendant of
an old family of this city. He participated in the Palinods from
1617 onward, and from 1623 to 1633 won a prize every year. The
Trots Slides Palinodiques (I, 54, 233) mention as subjects of his
poetry: "Les Noces de Cana"; "L'Huile odorante enclose dans la
Pierre"; "Un Marbre flottant sur les Eaux." He also sang of a
miracle supposed to have been performed by the Archbishop de
Harlay, who, it is said, quieted a storm on the Seine by the sign of
the cross. He acquired some local reputation and, in 1633, became
one of the judges of the Puy de l'Immacule*e Conception.1

I.G.A.E.P.

I explain these initials as: Jacques Goujon, Avocat en Parlement.
This lawyer, son of the Rouen merchant Etienne Goujon, had been
Corneille's comrade at school and always remained on good terms
with him. A letter of July 1, 1641, written by Corneille to Jacques
Goujon, who in 1638 was promoted from lawyer by the Parlement
to lawyer to the king's private council, has been published by Tasche-
reau. The end of the document touches on details of an intimate
nature, which leave no doubt that Jacques Goujon was one of the
most trusted friends of the poet. In 1643 he obtained for Corneille
the privilege for Cinna, Polyeucte, and La Mart de Pompee, and later
he took care of his interests as his counsel.2

i Cf. J. B. Lecompte, Monseigneur Francois de Harlay, Rouen, 1868; also an article
by HSron in La Normandie, July, 1898.

«Of. Taschereau, Histoire d« Pierre Corneille (3d ed.), I, 153, 252; George Dubosc,
Trois Normands, 7.

371

84 GUSTAVE L. VAN ROOSBROECK

C.B.

These are doubtless the initials of the playwright Charles Beys,
famous for his exploits in the cabarets (1610-59). His bibliography
has occasioned no little confusion. I will endeavor here to dis-
entangle and supplement it: In 1629, and not in 1635, as is generally
said, he published L'Ospital des Fous, Paris, Toussainct Quinet.
This play was imitated from the Spanish and was republished in
1653 with a different title, Les illustres Fous. His other plays are:
Les Jaloux sans sujet, 1635, and Celine, 1637. He contributed a
number of poems to the "receuils" of the time.

The Mazarinade: Les vrais sentiments des bons Frangois touchant
la Paix: A la Heine Regente (1649), signed C.B., is doubtless by
Charles Beys. In the same year he published a heroic poem: Les
Triomphes de Louys le Juste XIHe du nom. These works were
followed by Oeuvres poetiques (1652) and by Stances sur le depart de
Monseigneur le premier President (1652).

CONTESTED ATTRIBUTIONS

The Comedie des Chansons (1640) has been attributed to Beys and
to Timothe*e de Chillac.

The play UAmant liberal has been ascribed to Beys and to
Gue"rin de Bouscal. The satirical poem Le Gouvernement present ou
Moge de son Eminence ou La Milliade has been attributed to Beys,
to Favereau (a counselor at the "Cour des Aides") and to d'Estelon
(son of the Marshal de Saint-Luc).1

L.M.P.

These initials have long been known as those of Louis Mauduit,
Parisien. He was probably the son of the composer Jacques Mauduit
(1557-1627), friend of Bai'f and founder of the Acade*mie de Musique
during the reign of Charles IX. In his youth he was a close friend
of The"ophile de Viaud, but, frightened by his condemnation, he left
the Libertines and was converted to a stricter orthodoxy. In 1626
he contributed to a volume of poetry by various authors, Le Banquet

i Of. Ldntilhac, Histoire de la Comedie, Vol. I; LachSvre, Bibl. des Rec. coll., I, 10;
II, 150; III, 214; IV, 71; Bibliographic des Mazarinades; de L6ris, Dictionnaire, p. 393;
Goujet, XVI, 293; La Valliere, Bibl, II, 259.

372

CORNEILLE'S EARLY FRIENDS AND SURROUNDINGS 85

d'Apolon et des Muses, signing his poems L.M.P. In 1625 and 1628
he praised Nicolas Fre"nicle in verse preceding the latter's Oeuvres.
In 1631 he published a volume of poetry, Izabelle, amours de L.M.P.
Another publication gave his name in full, Les Devotions de L. Mauduit
P (a second edition, 1633) ^

PILLASTRE AVOCAT EN PARLEMENT

To the Norman family of this name belonged the Abbe* Pierre
Pillastre, historian. Pillastre, lawyer at the court of the Parle-
ment, was probably one of the colleagues of Corneille at Rouen.2

VILLENEUVE

Jean C6zar de Villeneuve did not sign his contribution, but he
wrote to Corneille:

Recois ces vers dont Villeneuve,
Ravi des beaute's de ta Veuve,
A fait hommage a ton savoir.

J. C. de Villeneuve was a Provengal nobleman, belonging to a
celebrated and ancient family. Among his ancestors he counted
fileon de Villeneuve, grandmaster of Rhodes (f!346). His oldest
brother, Arnaud de Villeneuve, was made a marquis by Louis XIII
in 1612. He himself had the titles of "sieur de la Garde de Freinet,"
and "sieur de la Motte." He had the reputation of being one of the
most cultivated gentlemen of letters of his time. Malherbe, with
whom he was very intimate, praises him in one of his latest odes:

La Garde, tes doctes Merits

Montrent le soin que tu as pris

A savoir toutes belles choses;

Et ta prestance et tes discours

Etalent un heureux concours

De toutes les graces ^closes ....

A letter of Malherbe to Villeneuve mentions "le judicieux Du
Vair, notre commun ami." Guillaume Colletet, who dedicated to
him his poem Les Bergers, wrote :

1 Of. Goujet, XV, 301 ; Viollet-le-Duc, Bibl. poetique.

1 The Abbe" Pierre Pillastre (1600-1666) was the secretary of Jacques Camus de
Font-Carre", bishop of S6ez. He published a De Ecclesia diocesis Sagiensis (1646-52),
5 vols. His manuscript works are in the library of M. Adolant-Desnas. Cf. FrSre,
Manuel du bibliographe Normand, II, and G. Grente, Jean Bertaut, 1903.

373

86 GUSTAVE L. VAN ROOSBROECK

Cher Villeneuve, & qui les doctes soeurs,
Ont a 1'envie prodigue" leurs douceurs,
Gentil esprit, ame la plus polie

D'entre tous ceux dont Pamitie" me lie

— Les Divertissements, 1631.

He was also an intimate of Louis Mauduit (see above), who dedi-
cated to him some of the poetry of his Izabelle. Verses of both are
found in the two volumes: L'Impiete des Deistes, Aihees et Libertins
de ce temps, combattue et renversee, etc., by Fr£re Martin Mersenne,
1624; and in the second volume, which appeared at the same time,
but with a slight change of title: L'Impiete des Deistes et des plus
subtils Libertins decouverte et refutee par raisons de Theologie et de
Philosophic, etc., 1624.

The works of Villeneuve were probably never printed. Malherbe
eulogized his Histoire Sainte and testified that his Carnaval des
honn&tes gens had obtained great success at the court. The magis-
trate, libertine, and playwright, Nicolas Fre*nicle, who was praised
by Villeneuve in a complimentary poem in his Oeuvres poetiques
1625), returned the compliment by eulogizing one of Villeneuve's
poems: Le Poeme de la Tulippe, which probably does not exist in
print.1

DE CANON

This poet-lawyer was one of the colleagues of Corneille. He has
left manuscript, Memoires du sieur de Canon, avocat en Parlement de
Normandie. He was probably related to the celebrated lawyer,
Pierre de Canon, author of the Commentaire sur les coutumes de
Lorraine (1634), who was ennobled by the Duke of Lorraine in
1626, "en consideration de sa probite*, doctrine et capacite", et de
Pestime et reputation en laquelle il estoit entre les premiers de sa
profession."2

L.N.

These initials probably stand for Martin Le Noir, a priest of the
order of the Augustins of Rouen, an author and a poet. As Cor-
neille's brother, Antoine, entered that order in 1627, Le Noir must

»Cf. Dictionnaire des Moreri, VIII; Goujet, XVII, 27; LachSvre, Le Prods de
Theophile, II, 100, 146; (Euvres de Malherbe, ed. Lalanne, I, 285, 355.

8 Of. Ploquet, Histoire du Parlement de Normandie, IV, 422, n. 2; Biographic Michaud,
SuppL, LX, 91.

374

CORNEILLE'S EARLY FRIENDS AND SURROUNDINGS 87

have been acquainted with the Corneille family. Le Noir published :
UUranopUe ou Navigation du Lid de Mort au port de Vie, 1616;
Le naif image de I'envie (with stances and sonnets) presente en etrennes
a toute la tres noble et antique maison de Mss. les genfreux Martels,
1611; L' Ante-Christ, a poem of which at least three editions are in
existence; Apologie contre la resolution de la Sanctification du Sainct
Dimanche et autre festes, Rouen, without date ; La franche acceptation
du deffy faict a frere Martin Le Noir, prieur des Augustins par certain
calomniateur anonyme, without date; Quatorze Sermons prdches d
Rouen, without date ; Sermon funebre prononce au conduit mortuaire
de tres haul et puissant Seigneur Messire Francois Martel, le 4 juillet,
1681, Rouen, 1631. The date of the death of Martin Le Noir has
been erroneously accepted as 1620, for, as shown by the last publica-
tion mentioned here, he preached at the burial of Frangois Martel in
1631.1

BURNEL

Some of the works of this poet are: Ode presentee d Monseigneur
le prince de Conty en la maison de ville sur son arrivee d Paris. Signed :
Burnel, Paris, 1649; a Mazarinade: Les Remerciements de la France
pour la Paix, d Monseigneur le Prince de Conty, Paris, 1649.2

GUILLAUME MARCEL

This friend of Corneille, whose real name was Masquerel, belonged
to the order of the Oratorians and was professor of rhetoric at Rouen
at the time of the publication of La Veuve. In 1641 he was teaching
the same subject at the college founded by the Archbishop de Harlay.
Later he became professor of eloquence at the College des Grassins in
Paris. He was born about 1610 at Bayeux and died as curate of
Basly (Calvados) in 1702. His works are numerous. A few are
listed here : Pax Promissa, sive pro Perpiniano capto oratio panegyrica,
Rouen, 1643; In Eloquentiam curoe primoe, Paris, 1646; La Seurete
catholique ou abrege de controverse, Caen, 1662; Oraison funebre de
haut et puissant seigneur Odet de Har court, Caen 1661; La censure de
la censure des tiedes ou remarques sur deux sermons de Du Bosc, Caen,
1670; Relation de ce qui s'est passe en la canonisation de St.Pierre

1 Cf. Oursel, Biographie Normande; Frgre, Manuel du bibliographe Normand.
8 Cf. Bibliographic des M marinades; Catalogue des Imp-rimes de la Bibl. Nation.

375

88 GUSTAFE L. VAN ROOSBROECK

d' Alcantara, Caen, 1670; Histoire de la solemnity de la canonisa-
tion de St. Francois de Borgia, Caen, 1672; Histoire de la suppression
du preche de Basly, Caen, 1680.1

VOILLE

This poet's full name was Voille de Bruyeres. He wrote compli-
mentary verse to Pierre du Ryer. In the Memoire de Mahelot the
stage setting is given of a play by a "sieur Desbruyeres," entitled
Le Romant de Paris. Is not this play, which seems lost, the work
of Voille de Bruy&res ?2

BEAULIEU

Alais, sieur de Beaulieu, published in 1634 a volume of poetry,
Les Divertisements d' Alais, sieur de Beaulieu, dedicated to Monsieur
de 1'Orme, father of the renowned Marion de 1'Orme. He was in
relation with Jacques Valise, sieur des Barreaux, the famous liber-
tine and poet. It is probably this Beaulieu who published the
novels: Les Aventures de Polyandre et Theoxene, par le sieur de
Beaulieu (1624), and La Solitude amour euse (163 1).3

A.C.

Lachevre reads these letters as representing A. Chappelain,
but this poet — probably a Parisian printer, publisher of Malherbe's
works — is only known through a single poem signed by his full
name and by one signed A.C. attributed to him. Is it not much more
probable that the poem for La Veuve was written by Antoine Cor-
neille, the brother of Pierre? In 1634 Antoine was twenty-three
years old. He made his de"but as a poet at the Palinod of Rouen in
1636 with an ode in honor of Saint Martinien. He was crowned
several times at these annual competitions and published in 1647
a volume of Poesies Chrestiennes*

1 Cf. Oursel, Biogr. Normande; Pr6re, Manuel; Lebreton, Biographie Rouennaise;
Lecompte, Mgr. de Harlay, 1868.

2 Of. H. Carrington Lancaster, Pierre du Ryer, p. 9; Mahelot, cited by Rigal, L«
TheAtre franyais avant la periode classique.

« Of. Lach8vre, Le Proces de Theophile, II. 209.

4 Cf. Lach§vre, Bibl. des Receuils coll., I, 143, and IV, 88. The Poesies Chrestiennes
were reprinted in 1877, in the collection of the "Bibliophiles Bouennais." The Trois
Siecles Palinodiques give information as to Antoine Corneille's d6but.

376

CORNEILLE'S EARLY FRIENDS AND SURROUNDINGS 89

Thus we see Corneille in his early period surrounded and praised
by not a few literary friends and acquaintances: de Marbeuf,
J. Collardeau, David du Petit- Val, Jean Gue"rente, de Canon, Martin
Le Noir, Guillaume Marcel, his brother Antoine, all of them living
at Rouen or near that city. To these must be added the celebrated
archbishop of Rouen, Monseigneur Frangois de Harlay (1590-1653).
The Latin poem which Corneille wrote for the Epinicia Musarum
Eminentissimo Cardinali de Richelieu (1634) was an answer to an
invitation of the prelate to write verse in honor of Louis XIII and
Richelieu. He was considered one of the most eminent minds of his
time: "Franciscus de Harlay, vir linguarum dives, doctrind et
auctoritate stupendus," says Abraham Golnitzi in his Ulysses Bellico-
Gallico, p. 209. On September 8, 1618, at the age of twenty-eight, he
succeeded the Cardinal de Joyeuse as archbishop of Rouen and for
many decades protected letters, art, and learning. He was theo-
logian, controversialist, historian, orator, and writer of Latin poetry.1

In 1630 he founded at Rouen one of the first public libraries of
France. One of the buildings belonging to the Cathedral was trans-
formed into a reading-room, where from forty to fifty thousand
volumes were put at the disposal of the clergy and the inhabitants.
The Diaire du Chancelier Seguier mentions this collection of books:
"En la dicte bibliotheque on s'est longuement arreste", sans nean-
moins en veoir les particularitez ; elle a este donee par le diet archeves-
que au chapitre de son eglize cathedrale pour les inciter a Pestude.
... II y a assez grand nombre de volumes, que le diet archevesque
estime 40 ou 50 mil mal couvertz" (p. 127).

In the chateau atGaillon he assembled the circle called "I/ Academic
de Saint Victor," which he had founded at Paris. There gathered
in erudite meetings the notables of the clergy of Rouen, among others
Antoine Gaulde, "vicaire-gene"ral" of Rouen, Hellenist and poet,
and the canon Robert le Cornier de Ste.-Helene, "grand-vicaire,"
occasional poet and protector of letters. But the most important
member of the Academy, from the literary point of view, was the
prolific writer and witty friend of St. Francis de Sales, Jean-Pierre
Camus, bishop of Belley (1582-1652). He came to Rouen in 1629

1 He addressed to his academicians a Latin poem, Solatium Musarum, and collabo-
rated in the Epinicia Musarum of 1634.

377

90 GUSTAVE L. VAN ROOSBEOEOK

as Abbe* d'Aulnay and vicar-general to the archbishop. His fame,
based upon a hundred novels, stories, and miscellaneous edifying
writings, as well as upon his untiring apostolic zeal, eloquence, and
wit, made him one of the most prominent literary personalities of
the day.

Some other writers stood near to Corneille, Pierre de Brinon,
for example, a counselor at the Parlement of Rouen, who died in 1658.
It would have been very strange if Corneille had not had relations
with a fellow-citizen who belonged to the same social milieu of
magistrates as himself and who had published the tragi-comedy
V Ephesienne and other plays translated from Buchanan. Francois
d'Eudemare of Rouen, judge of the Palinods, after having been
crowned many times himself, was certainly not unknown to Corneille.
He was a historian and a devotional writer as well as a poet, and
lived long enough to see the initial success of Corneille, for he died of
the plague July 2, 1635. The learned and poetical society of Cor-
neille's native city counted at the time many other men of science,
wit, and literary taste. The priest Nicolas Guillebert published eight
or nine volumes and was one of the most successful competitors in
the Palinods; Jean Titelouse (f!633) was the most celebrated organ-
player of his time and an occasional poet.

A Rouen playwright, Le Vert, prided himself on his friendship
with his famous compatriot. In the Avis au Lecturer of his tragi-
comedy Aricidie ou le Mariage de Tite (1646), he defends the custom
of writing prefaces, and adds: "Je n'ignore pas que cette mienne
opinion ne puisse £tre condamne'e de quelques uns; mais je sais
bien aussi qu'elle est suivie de beaucoup d'autres, et que j'ai pour
modele et pour partisan (comme pour ami et pour compatriote, dont
je ne tire pas une petite vanite") le grand maitre de 1'art qui dans
Cinna et le Polyeucte n'a pas juge" hors de propos de pre*parer ses
lecteurs par des commencements semblables" (cf. Marty-Laveaux,
III, 367).

Claude Sarrau, who had the reputation of being one of the most
erudite scholars of his epoch, must be counted among Corneille's
early friends. One of his letters to Corneille is extant and has been
published (Marty-Laveaux, X, 438). He lived at Rouen, was a
Counsellor at the Parlement of Normandy, and became intimate
with Corneille during this period. Through this acquaintance,

378

CORNEILLE'S EARLY FRIENDS AND SURROUNDINGS

Corneille must have learned about the prominent personalities of
the learned society of Europe, for, as early as 1627, Claude Sarrau
corresponded with Hugo Grotius and with other celebrities.1

Taschereau in his Histoire de Pierre Corneille (II, 69) has drawn
attention to some of Corneille's friends. Among them some were,
or had been, inhabitants of his native city; the Pascals, Lucas, "connu
pour habile homme de tout ce qu'il y a d'habiles" gens a l'Acade*mie"
(Boursault) ; Voyer d'Argenson, later French ambassador to Venice,
and the poet Georges de Bre"beuf (1617-61). The important literary
friendship which grew up between him and Corneille and his indebted-
ness to his friend's work have been the object of thoroughgoing
study.2 A passage in Bre*beuf s Correspondence sheds light on their
personal relations. The plague was devastating Rouen, as on many
previous occasions during the seventeenth century, and Bre*beuf
wanted to leave the stricken city: "Enfin, il faut tascher de m'en
tirer. Je vous ay de"ja dit que Mm. de Corneille m'offrent une place
dans leur carosse. Le mauvais temps et ma mauvaise saute"
m'obligent a les attendre" (I, 72).

Both poets had great reverence for Madame Laurence de Belle-
fonds, an aristocratic and cultivated abbess, who reorganized in
1648 the convent of Notre Dame des Anges at Rouen. She was the
author of various works, among others of a Traduction des hymnes de
VEglise. It is said that she had a merited reputation as a tasteful
judge of verse and that both Corneille and BrSbeuf owed much to
her enlightened counsel.3

As not the least among Corneille's literary acquaintances must
be ranked the distinguished Rouen family de Campion. When
Alexandre de Campion, diplomat, poet, and mayor of Rouen, pub-
lished his book Les Hommes illustres (1657), Corneille addressed to
him a preliminary sonnet which contains some proud lines:

J'ai quelqu'art d'arracher les grands noms du tombeau,
De leur rendre un destin plus durable et plus beau,
De faire qu'apr&s moi 1'avenir se souvienne.

1 Of. Claudii Saravii, Senatoris parisiensis, epistolae (1654) for letters to Saumalse,
Bochart, Gronovius, Fabricius, and others.

2 Harmand, Essai sur la vie et les ceuvres de Georges de Brebeuf, pp. 50, 277, 409, 461.
» Her dates are from 1612 to 1683. She was the daughter of the Marquis de Belle-

fonds, " lieutenant-ge'ne'ral des armSes du roy." Cf. Bouhours, Vie de Mme de Belief onds,
1686; Parin, Histoire de la ville de Rouen, III (1668), 450; R. Harmand, Essai sur Georges
de Brebeuf, p. 21; Oursel, Biographic Normande.

379

92 GtJSTAfE L. VAN ROOSBEOECK

Le mien semble avoir droit a rimmortalite',
Mais ma gloire est autant au-dessous de la tienne
Que la fable, en effet, cede a la ve*rite*.

Corneille must have been acquainted also with the two brothers
of this important personage, Henri de Campion, author of interesting
Memoires, and the prior Nicolas de Campion, who also was a wor-
shiper of the Muses. A member of this family, Louis Martainville
de Marsilly, married in 1686 a daughter of Thomas Corneille.

Among Pierre Corneille's most devoted friends the satirical poet
Louis Petit stands out. In his youth he had been one of the habitues
of the Hotel de Rambouillet and later, when "receveur ge"ne*ral des
domaines et bois du roy" at Rouen, he remained intimate with some
"gentilhommes de lettres" like the Duke of Montausier, later
governor of Normandy, and the Marquis de Saint-Aignan. He
wrote verses to Corneille under the pastoral disguise of Damon,
followed him to Paris in 1662 and after his death published an
edition of his works.1

We might also touch upon the well-known friendly relations of
Corneille with the Jesuits of his native city, in whose school he was
educated. Among them he liked especially those who had a taste
for literature. To his former teacher, the Jesuit Delidel, author of
the Theologie des Saints and poet in Latin, he dedicated the poem
beginning "Savant et pieux e*crivain, Qui jadis de ta propre main
M'as eleve sur le Parnasse." One of his most intimate friends was
the Jesuit and playwright Charles de la Rue, whose Latin poems he
translated and who was probably the godfather of his third son,
Charles Corneille.2

It is strange, no doubt, that Corneille never participated in the
annual contests in religious poetry at the Puy de PImmaculee Con-
ception of Rouen, where both his brothers presented verse; he may
have been present at various occasions, as in 1640, when he thanked

1 His works are: Discours satyriques et moraux ou Satyr es generates, Rouen, 1685
(republished by Olivier, 1883) ; Dialogues satyriques et moraux, Rouen, 1687, in prose.
He left a manuscript Les Oeuvres poetiques de Louis Petit, 1658. A part of it, in "patois
Normand" was published with the title La Muse Normande by Chassau (1853). Louis
Petit sent poetry to some of the receuils of the time and to the Mercure Galant. Cf.
Goujet, BibL, XVIII; Revue de Rouen, 1850; Precis de I' Academie de Rouen, 1827;
Lebreton, Biographic Rouennaise.

2 Cf . Picot, Bibliographic Cornelienne; Marty-Laveaux, X.

380

CORNEILLE'S EARLY FRIENDS AND SURROUNDINGS 93

the judges in the name of Jacqueline Pascal. The reasons for his
attitude are easy to understand as far as his early years are con-
cerned. At that time he was a rather worldly young man, belonging
to the "gaie jeunesse" of Rouen, as is proved by his early poetry and
by the risky and frequently indecent expressions of his Clitandre and
his Melite (erased from the editions after 1658). The time when
he will versify the Imitation is as yet far off. But the Palinods always
interested him, no doubt, as one of the literary activities of his
native city.

The names of the authors cited above, although they do not
exhaust the list of Corneille's early literary acquaintances, are
sufficient to prove the existence at Rouen of a considerable literary
milieu at the time of Corneille's early plays. It is plain that a brisk
literary life flourished in Normandy and its capital during the early
decades of the seventeenth century, powerfully helped by the local
development of printing, by the success in letters of a group of
Normans — Malherbe, Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, Bertaut and
Boisrobert — and by the existence at Rouen of an academy counting
among its members Camus, the Archbishop de Harlay, and a number
of local celebrities. Rather than as a young man almost ignorant
of literature, who, by a stroke of genius was changed from a prosaic
lawyer into a poet, we view Corneille in his early years as spurred
on by his surroundings and by his friends to the preparation of his
life's work. A sympathetic and informed reader of the literature
of his times, as well as of antiquity and foreign countries, he associ-
ated early with the kindred spirits among the local savants, poets,
and playwrights, and enjoyed from the beginning their esteem and
their praise. Without yielding to literary determinism, without
pretending to explain Corneille as an artist and a creator solely by
his surroundings and the early influences he underwent, it is yet
justifiable to consider him as the most perfect interpreter of the
literary movement of his native city and of his province.

GUSTAVE L. VAN ROOSBROECK
UNIVERSITY OP MINNESOTA

381

EPIC UNITY AS DISCUSSED BY SIXTEENTH-CENTURY
CRITICS IN ITALY

The ideas of the critical writers of the sixteenth century in Italy
on the question of unity in the epic have never been tabulated,
although the dramatic unities, first promulgated by these writers,
have been discussed at length. It is the purpose of this article to
give, in chronological order, the various theories on the subject of
epic unity propounded by the critical writers in the half-century
from Vida (1527) to Castelvetro (1570), a period in which the ques-
tion was variously treated until it reached in Castelvetro its final
development in the idea of the three unities.

Inasmuch as in such an investigation one cannot for a moment
lose sight of Aristotle's dictum on this question of unity, it would
seem advantageous to call to mind what he has to say. At the out-
set it should be understood that the unities are deduced primarily
from the practice of tragedy and were applied only secondarily to
the epic. This is particularly true of what little is said regarding
the unities of time and place in the epic, but Aristotle discusses the
whole subject of unity chiefly with regard to tragedy, and much of
what his followers have repeated is written with an eye to the
example of tragic unity.

In the Poetics, the question of unity receives a longer treatment
than many of the other points discussed. By the rule of beauty a
poetic creation must have at the same time unity and plurality. If
it is too small the whole is perceived but not the parts; if too large
the parts are perceived but not the whole. On this principle a
whole such as the Trojan War is too vast in its compass even for
epic treatment; it cannot be grasped by the mind and incurs the
risk of becoming a series of detached incidents. The Platonic idea
of an organism evidently underlies Aristotle's rules concerning
unity. It is especially evident in one passage: "The construction
of its stories should be like that in a drama; they should be based
on a single action, one that is a complete whole in itself, with a

383] 95 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, November, 1920

96 RALPH C. WILLIAMS

beginning, middle, and end, so as to enable the work to produce its
own proper pleasure, with all the organic unity of a living creature."1

The unity of a plot does not consist in having one man as its
subject; an infinity of things befalls that one man, some of which
cannot be reduced to unity, and there are many actions of one man
which cannot be made to form one action. Homer, in writing the
Odyssey, did not make the poem cover all that befell his hero, but
he represented one action with its several incidents so closely con-
nected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them would
have interfered with the continuity of the whole. The epic, being
in narrative form, may describe a number of simultaneous incidents,
and these, if germane to the subject, increase the body of the poem
without destroying its unity. The general law of unity laid down
in the Poetics for an epic poem is almost the same as for tragedy,
but the epic, being of wider compass, can admit many episodes
which serve to fill in the pauses of the action, or to diversify the
interest, or to embellish the narrative. The introduction of episodes,
however, conduces to the result that there is less unity in the imita-
tion of epic poets, inasmuch as from one epic many tragic plots may
be derived. It is an evident fact, however, that if a single story
were treated it would seem curt when briefly told, and thin and
extenuated when prolonged to the usual epic length. On this point
Professor Bywater translates Aristotle as follows: "In saying that
there is less unity in an epic, I mean an epic made up of a plurality
of actions, in the same way as the Iliad and Odyssey have such
parts, each one of them in itself of some magnitude; yet the structure
of the two Homeric poems is as perfect as can be, and the action in
them as nearly as possible one action."2

In some inferior epics, although there is a certain unity in the
story, it is not of the right kind, as the action consists of a plurality
of parts, each of them easily detached from the rest of the work.
Several tragedies may be made from a single epic of this type,
whereas the Iliad or the Odyssey does not supply materials for more
than one or two. This emphatic assertion of the unity of action in
the Homeric epic is not quite in harmony with statements made

1 1. Bywater, Aristotle on the Art of Poetry, Oxford, 1909, p. 71.
2 Of. Bywater, op. cit., p. 91.

384

EPIC UNITY IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY 97

elsewhere in the Poetics. The story of the Iliad, for instance, is
said to contain a plurality of actions.1 This plurality of action is
not, one can feel assured, condoned by Aristotle; on the contrary,
to the extent that there is a plurality of action, to that same extent
are the poems of Homer comparable to the "inferior epics."

Homer did not attempt to treat the Trojan War in its entirety
—though it was a whole with a definite beginning and end — through
a feeling apparently that it was too long a story to be grasped in
one view, or, if not that, too complicated from the variety of inci-
dent. As it is, he has selected one section of the whole, bringing
in many other matters as episodes, as, for example, the catalogue
of the ships.

The only unity enjoined by Aristotle for the epic is the unity
of action which we have just discussed. As everyone knows, the
doctrine of the unity of time is based on one passage in the Poetics
where Aristotle states that the epic is of greater length than tragedy,
"which is due to its having no fixed limit of time, whereas tragedy
endeavors to keep as far as possible within a single circuit of the
sun."2 As to the length of the epic, it must be possible for the
beginning and the end of the work to be comprehended in one view,
a condition which will be fulfilled if the poem is shorter than the
old epics, and about as long as the series of tragedies offered for
one hearing. Aristotle is here speaking merely of the material
length of the epic, and not of any unity of time. He is referring to
the real length of the work itself, a length measured by the number
of lines a poem would take up in a book, or the number of hours
required for recitation. Aristotle never loses sight of the obvious
fact that the epic (the Iliad, for instance) extends its length to
several thousand lines, whereas a tragedy rarely exceeds some
sixteen hundred lines. This difference in length between the epic

1 "One should also remember what has been said more than once, and not write a
tragedy on an epic body of incident (i.e., with a plurality of stories in it) by attempting
to dramatize, for instance, the entire body of the Iliad" (By water, chap, xviii, p. 53);
and again (chap, xxvi) : "We must remember that there is less unity in the 'imitation of
epic poets, as is proved by the fact that any one work of theirs supplies matter for several
tragedies. In saying that there is less unity in an epic, I mean an epic made up of a
plurality of actions, in the same way as the Iliad and Odyssey have many such parts,
each one of them in itself of some magnitude" (Bywater, p. 91).

* Ibid., p. 15.

385 '

98 RALPH C. WILLIAMS

and the tragedy is, for Aristotle, the natural consequence of another
kind of difference, i.e., the fact that the action in a Greek tragedy
is as a rule kept within a limit of some twenty-four hours, whereas
that of the epic may extend over weeks, months, or years.

With this difference, therefore, in the extent of the action, in the
quantum of matter to be included in the story, it is only natural that
there should be a corresponding difference in the length of the exter-
nal form in the two cases. Assuming this correspondence, Aristotle
explains the great length of an epic compared with a tragedy, as
due to the length of time over which the epic action extends. In
other words, he passes from the idea of the actual length, the actual
time required for the recitation, to that of the imaginary time
covered by the action of the poem, apparently with the tacit assump-
tion that the two things are so closely connected that the one may
serve to explain the other. It would be absolutely wrong to deduce,
however, that Aristotle is anywhere making the time of the actual
recitation of the epic coincide with the time of presentation of a
series of tragedies acted in a single day. The epic, then, must be
a whole, but not too long a whole. This condition will be fulfilled
if the epic is about the length of a trilogy, and thus considerably
shorter than the Iliad and the Odyssey. He evidently thinks that
an epic on the old Homeric scale of length would prove too great a
strain on the memory and attention of the literary public of his
own time.

The discussion of unity may be divided into two main topics:
the fundamental and basic idea that the plot should deal with one
action — an Aristotelian precept which is generally denominated the
''unity of action"; and, secondly, the so-called unity of time,
derived by critics from the first, and bearing such an intimate rela-
tion to it that at times it becomes impossible to separate the two,
although in this article an effort will be made to consider them singly.
As a subdivision of the unity of action the question of the intro-
duction of episodes will be treated. The word "episode" is used
by the sixteenth-century critics in its literal meaning, that is, a
"coming in besides," a digression or incident outside the plot or
main action (generally called the favola) but related to it, and
forming with the plot the whole narration or story.

386

EPIC UNITY IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY

Trissino, in treating the question of the unity of action, inter-
prets Aristotle more broadly than many sixteenth-century critics.
Although in his dedication to Charles V preceding the Italia liberata
Trissino says that he intends to treat one and only one of the many
actions of Justinian, he adds that he purposes to commence at the
beginning of the war and finish at the end, or, in other words, he
considers the entire war as a unit, the treatment of which, he thinks,
finds complete justification in Aristotelian rules. It will be remem-
bered, however, that Aristotle commends Homer for not attempting
to deal with the Trojan War in its entirety, and adds that Homer
had refrained from so doing through a feeling, apparently, that the
story was of too great length to be grasped in one view. Trissino,
although fully aware of Aristotle's dictum on this subject,1 inter-
prets this in such a way as to justify the selection of an entire war,
provided that, by so doing, the poem still remain of ordinary length
and be not too complicated by variety of incident, and provided
that the beginning and the end can still be grasped in one view.
The words of Aristotle seem, however, to be capable of the single
inference that he considered any war as a subject too vast for a
single poem.

Robortelli, in his commentary on Aristotle, repeats the latter's
doctrine regarding the organism by saying that the epic embraces
a single, perfect, and complete action, and that, if it be complete
in every part like some animal, it is beautiful and affords pleasure.
If an author constitutes many actions in the epic, he departs from
its proper art, for it ought to be a single, simple action.2 In apparent
opposition to the latter statement, he asserts that a tragic action
ought to be simple, but that the epic makes the nature of its action
complicated.8 He undoubtedly has in mind, however, the intro-
duction of episodes and not any complexity of the plot proper, for
he maintains4 that the epic, which is legitimately increased by
episodes, is longer than tragedy because it includes more episodes.
He seems to use the word actio in the sense that Minturno employs
the word narratio or story, as is more evident in the following passage :

» Trissino, "De arte poetica," in Tutte le opere, Verona, 1729, p. 113.
* Robortelli, In librum Ariatotelis de arte poetica ezplicatione». Florentiae, 1548,
p. 320.

» Ibid., p. 215. « Ibid., p. 206.

387

100 RALPH C. WILLIAMS

"In the epic many parts of the action are completed at the same
time; episodes are parts of the action, and each one has a perfect
and complete action in itself/'1 yet the epic as a whole seems to be a
single action. Some, ignorant of the reason (rationem) and the art
(artificium) of the heroic poem, have followed all the deeds of one
man which were either accomplished at one time or in the space of
many years. The action in such a poem is not one but becomes
manifold (multiplicem) and diverse.2 Such a poem is not to be con-
demned from the point of view of length of time, because, in his
opinion, in its imitation the epic may legitimately embrace matters
covering not only a day and night but many days, months, and
years — a very flexible and elastic freedom when compared to the
limits imposed by later critics, such as Minturno; it would be
condemned only as offending the unity of action, the only unity
Robortelli recognizes.

Bernardo Segni maintains that the plot is one and perfect when
it relates a single action.3 In this way it can be said that the Iliad,
the Odyssey, and the Aeneid are a single action. "Let it not dis-
turb us if in these poems many matters are found, because such
things are episodes." But the action of each of these poems is a
single action, he repeats. The episodes treat of things outside the
action which the poet purposes to imitate, which, nevertheless, are
not entirely separate from it but agree with it in some part. Follow-
ing the ideas of Robortelli ("Rubertello," as he calls him), he makes
the statement that the heroic poem imitates an action lasting several
years.

In the work of Giraldi Cinthio defending the romanzi we find a
far different idea concerning unity from that which we have met
heretofore. The writer of the romanzi chooses a subject not of one
action of one man but of "one or more illustrious actions of one or
more excellent men."4 Ariosto and Boiardo, he believes, have ful-
filled these conditions. The subject-matter of the romanzi is differ-
ent from the works of Virgil and Homer because both of these have

1 Robortelli, In librum Aristotelis de arte poetica explications . Florentiae, 1548,
p. 320.

* Ibid., p. 271.

1 Rettorica et Poetica d ' Aristotile tradotte di Greco in lingua vulgar e Fiorentina, Pirenze,
1549, p. 300.

« G. Giraldi Cinthio, Discorsi, Vinegia, 1554, p. 8.

388

EPIC UNITY IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY

101

undertaken to imitate a single action of a single man, whereas
Ariosto and Boiardo have imitated many actions not only of one
man but of many.1 " And although it appears that Aristotle blames
in his Poetics those who wrote a Theseid or a Heracleid, he does not
condemn them (if his words are well considered) on account of the
composition or the subject, but because it appeared to these authors
whom he blames that in writing the deeds of a single man they were
making a poem of a single action, an opinion certainly far from true,
and worthy of being blamed."2

4 'All the poetic compositions which contain deeds of heroes are
not restricted within the bounds which Aristotle has imposed upon
the poets who write poems of a single action."3 Giraldi contends
that it is better to follow many actions than a single action, because
it seems that this method is more adapted to the composition in
the form of romanzi, for this diversity of action carries with it a
variety which is delightful, and furnishes ample opportunity for the
introduction of episodes or pleasing digressions and events which
could never fittingly happen in that manner of poetry which describes
a single action.4 Despite this greater freedom in choice of subject,
he cautions the poet to keep in mind the harmonious arrangement
of the matter. "And this disposition ought not to be alone con-
sidered in the principal parts, which are beginning, middle, and
end, but in every smaller section of these parts."5 He adopts as
an excellent simile that of the body, comparing it to a composition,
as follows: "Just as a man's body is made of bones, nerves, flesh,
and skin, so the compositions of good poets, who write romanzi,
ought to have parts in the body of the poem which correspond to
the parts of the human body."6 The sections should be joined to
each other like parts of the body, though in a manner different
from that of Homer and Virgil.

The writers of romanzi, having taken the actions of many from
the beginning, have not been able to continue one matter from
canto to canto, on account of the fact that all of them are intimately
connected. But it has been necessary for them, after speaking of
one of their characters, to pass to another, breaking off the narration

» Ibid., p. 11.
*/6id.,p. 14.

s Ibid., p. 22.
« Ibid., p. 25.

389

• Ibid., p. 26.

• Ibid., p. 16.

102 RALPH C. WILLIAMS

of the first and entering into the deeds of the other, and with this
order to continue until the end, "a thing which they have done
with marvelous art."1 An especially interesting passage shows
Giraldi's ideas regarding the nature of the episodes that may be
treated. " There can be introduced into the compositions/' he says,
" loves, unexpected events, wrongs, vices, offenses, defences, deceits;
deeds of courtesy, justice, liberality, virtue, treachery, faith, loyalty,
etc., and such other episodes; and there can be introduced such
variety and delight that the poem will become most pleasing."2

Giraldi does not believe that the story of a whole life would be
a poor composition or lacking in pleasure or utility. "For we will-
ingly read in prose the life of Themistocles, Coriolanus, or Romulus,
and of other excellent men; why ought it to be less pleasing and
less profitable to read it composed in verse by a noble and wise
poet? For he knows how the lives of heroes ought to be written
in verse for an example to the world, like history."3 As the Italian
has its own forms of poetry different from those of other tongues
and other countries, the Tuscan poet ought not to be confined by
the limits within which the Greeks and the Latins were constrained
but ought to proceed along the paths which the best Italian poets
have indicated, with the same authority which the Greeks and
Latins had in their language. "And this is the reason that I have
many times smiled at those who have wished to place the writers of
romanzi under the laws of art given by Aristotle and Horace, not
considering the fact that neither one nor the other knew this tongue,
nor this manner of composing."4 Giraldi, nevertheless, does not
lightly cast aside the precepts of the ancients. " I do not say this,
however, because I blame the precepts which are necessary to good
composition, as are those which Aristotle, Cicero, and the other
ancients gave."5

Pigna's ideas are somewhat similar to those of Giraldi, although
it is interesting to see that there are differences between the two
which one would not expect to find, in view of the fact that Pigna
bewails loudly the appropriation of his ideas by his teacher. Pigna,
too, contends that romanzi are different from the older epic, chiefly

i G. Giraldi Cinthio, Discorai, Vinegia, 1554, p. 41.

* Ibid., p. 43. > Ibid., p. 20. « Ibid., p. 45. » Ibid., p. 75.

390

IPIC UNITY IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY

103

on account of the fact that where the Greek and Latin poets speak
continuously the Italians interrupt the course of their poems from
time to time.1 He, too, although with less elaborateness, considers2
the epic like an animal composed of substance and extraneous things
(accidenti), the accidenti being the episodes which are digressions
placed outside the principal action.3 As in a good composition the
members will be proportionate, so in a poor one they will be pro-
longed where it is unnecessary.4 He recognizes, however, that the
epic action is essentially one action of one person.5 He differs from
Giraldi in saying that, although the romanzi are adapted to depict
many deeds of many men, they devote themselves especially to
one man who is celebrated above all the others, and thus they agree
with the epics in depicting a single person. But this is not the case,
he adds, when it is a question of taking a single fact, because the
writers of romanzi treat as many actions as they deem suitable, nor
do the romanzi agree with the epics in making one action supreme
and the others subordinate.6 Furthermore, Pigna, in direct opposi-
tion to the statement of Giraldi Cinthio, asserts that Aristotle has
been the guide in romanzi, although he did not speak of them.7
He contends also that Ariosto followed classic models. "And
although the love of Angelica could have been treated differently,
nevertheless it was related in this manner following the example of
the Iliad."8 "And to show that he has followed the Greek and
Latin poets equally, he took care to begin his poem with the lines of
the Iliad and to conclude it according to the form of the Aeneid."9
Bernardo Tasso, writing to Benedetto Varchi under date of
March 6, 1559,10 reduces the whole question to the consideration of
the effect produced. "If Aristotle were born in this age and should
see the most pleasing poem of Ariosto's, knowing the force of custom
and realizing that it furnishes so much delight, I do not know whether
he would change his opinion and consent 'that a heroic poem could

» G. Battista Pigna, I Romanzi, Vinegia, 1554, p. 14.

* Ibid., p. 15. ' Ibid., p. 42. « Ibid., p. 9. * Ibid., p. 25. • Ibid., p. 25.
7 Ibid., p. 65. "Et come in tutto il Duello non mai da lui veduto, lume ne diede
i Aristotele, cost quivi ne Romanzi 6 stato la nostra guida, benche egli mai non ne

• Ibid., p. 78. • Ibid., p. 80.

» Cf. Porcacchi, Lettere di XIII huomini illustrij, Venetia, 1576, pp. 444 fl.

391

104 RALPH C. WILLIAMS

be made of many actions, giving it new rules and prescribing for it
new laws with his wonderful learning and judgment."

Capriano, disagreeing with Aristotle when he gives precedence
to tragedy, declares that the fact that the epic includes an action
of many years does not cause it to have less unity or to be less
pleasing.1

Minturno, in the De Poeta, repeats the Aristotelian precept that
the epic plot should be one, complete, and perfect, and that the
beginning, middle, and end should be in accord.2 Like Robor-
telli and Giraldi, he uses the illustration of the organism. "Is not
the human body complete and one ? But its parts are head, arms,
hands, legs, and feet, which by themselves are complete and one."8
Therefore when a heroic poem is occupied with one action the plot
will be one; and, because it will be protracted to a great length, it is
customary for such a poem to embrace events from which many
dramatic plots can be formed. Although the heroic narrative is
permitted to include many things, it ought not, however, to be so
prolonged that it seems overburdened, nor of such length that it
cannot be completely grasped.4 Minturno does not share the
opinion of such writers as Segni, Madius, and Capriano. Although
declaring that the plot will be one if the action is one, he continues
saying that if a writer observe the poems of the ancients he will
discover that epic actions are perfect if within the period of one year.8

Vettori contends that Aristotle teaches that one epic can be
rightly prolonged to the same time limit that is required for the
representation of a number of tragedies, "so that if the spectators
remain in the theatre for the space of eight hours paying attention
to many tragedies which are portrayed, to that same space of time
the epic may be prolonged, for it may be supposed that men would
hear with pleasure an epic poem recited for the same number of
hours."6 He admonishes epic writers, therefore, that they should
not give the epic a larger body than would be that of all those
tragedies which are produced in one day, for although epic poems

» Capriano, Delia vera poetica, Vinegla. 1555, chap. iv.

» De Poeta, Venetils, 1555, p. 147.

» Ibid., p. 152. « Ibid. « Ibid., p. 133.

• P. Victorius (Vettori), Commentarii in primum librum Aristotelit tie arte poetarum,
Florentiae, 1560, p. 250.

392

EPIC UNITY IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY 105

were not recited in the theater in the same manner as tragedy, yet,
if they were read aloud, the recitation or reading of the epic poem
would consume the same amount of time as that occupied in the
action of the tragic plot, an idea which was later attacked by Castel-
vetro. Vettori observes that when Aristotle asserts that the epic
is extended to its proper length by means of episodes, he means
that without episodes the epic would be insignificant, or, in other
words, he wishes to signify that the length which is perceived in
every epic work is contributed by the episodes and is not part of the
argument; "for some ignorant person who could not distinguish
episodes from the argument of the poem thought that this prolixity
arose from the argument."1 Vettori is merely corroborating the
assertions of Segni, Giraldi, and others regarding the true nature
and use of the episodes.

Scaliger seems to lay himself open to the criticism of Vettori as
being one of the imperiti who fail to distinguish episodes from the
argument where he says that, inasmuch as several plots can be
extracted from the Iliad and the Odyssey, they cease to be a com-
plete organism with one plot. " Finally Aristotle laughs at those
who think that either the Iliad or the Odyssey is a complete organism
with one plot, for he says that one may draw several plots from
either one, because there are many parts and many episodes. So
it was that the ancients used to recite certain portions taken from
the whole body, as, for instance, the battle and catalogue of the
ships, the summoning of the spirits, those things which happened on
Circe's island, etc."2

One should certainly not be overhasty in condemning Scaliger as
imperitus, but he is unquestionably open to the criticism of failing
to state his thought clearly, and of failing to define his terms. When
Aristotle says that several plots can be composed from the poems
of Homer he means tragic plots and not epic plots (Scaliger implies
the latter meaning by his use of the word fabulas) and consequently
Aristotle does not "laugh at those who think that the Iliad or the
Odyssey is a complete organism with one plot." It will be recalled
that what Aristotle really said was that "the Iliad and the Odyssey
have many parts, each one of them in itself of some magnitude; yet

> Ibid., p. 173. « J. C. Scaliger, Poetices, MDXCIV, lib. i, cap. T.

393

106 RlLPH C. WILLIAMS

the structure of the two Homeric poems is as perfect as can be, and
the action in them as nearly as possible one action,"1 and Aristotle
recommends that they be accepted as models in so far as they are
one organism with one plot. Scaliger, however, recognizes the need
of unity when he subscribes to the Aristotelian idea of the organism.
The author should divide his book into chapters, "all so related that
they constitute an organic body."

Inasmuch as Trissino's Arte poetica is little more than a para-
phrase of Aristotle, we find almost all the precepts of the Stagirite
repeated with only slight variation. In the fifth division, appear-
ing in 1563, for instance,2 Trissino says that care must be taken in
forming the plot, that it be one, complete, and great; and this "one"
does not mean that it includes all the deeds of a single man, a matter
in which many are deceived. Trissino gives as an example of this
idea of unity the Decameron of Boccaccio, thus interpreting in its
broadest significance the idea of Aristotle that the plot should be
based on a single action, so as to enable the work to produce its own
pleasure. It is not many actions of one man, but a unity resulting
from the concerted action of many.

Minturno, in VArte poetica, contends that the romanzi are not
the poetry which Aristotle and Horace taught.3 There are those,
he continues, who confess that the romanzi do not conform to the
form and rule which Homer and Virgil followed, and yet obstinately
defend this error, saying that because such compositions treat of the
deeds of wandering knights they need not conform to Aristotelian
laws but require the inclusion of diverse matters. The heroic poem
imitates one memorable, perfect deed of one illustrious person; the
romanzi have for their object the assembling of knights and ladies,
and the treatment of matters of war and of peace. The romanzi
describe diverse countries and various things which happened in all
the time which the story covers. Homer, he agrees, did the same
thing to a certain extent, but everything he described had its origin
from one beginning and was directed to one end* This is not the
case in the romanzi* However, he contends that Ariosto could have

i Cf. Bywater, op. cit., p. 91.

* Cf. Trissino, Tutte le opere, Verona, 1729, p. 97.
» Uarte poetica, Napoli, MDCCXXV, p. 26.

* Ibid., p. 27.

394

EPIC UNITY IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY

107

adhered to the same law of unity by treating the same subject-
matter in a different way. If Ariosto was not content to treat only
the affairs of Ruggiero as the most excellent of all knights, he should
have composed another story devoted only to his deeds, just as
Homer had done, who praised Achilles in the Iliad and Ulysses in
the Odyssey. He would not then have pretended in the title that
he was writing of Orlando, and then in reality have described the
deeds of another as the principal character, nor would he have
assembled a great mass of persons and things such that a whole
poem would be required to describe some of them. Minturno does
not say this to detract from the worth of Ariosto as a poet but rather
to excuse him for not knowing better than to follow the abuses of
the romanzi to please the many.1 The writers of romanzi interrupt
frequently the course of the poem, going from one part to another,
and taking up the thread again where they left off. The inter-
ruption of the narrative, contends Minturno, interferes with the
enjoyment of the reader; the interest is aroused by many incidents
contributing to the same end.

As a perfect and well-formed animal causes delight, so is the plot
sufficiently complete which can cause pleasure to the minds of
others.2 It is manifest that Virgil and Homer have undertaken to
treat a complete and perfect matter concerning things which hap-
pened only within a year. Homer treats in the Iliad that which
happened in the tenth year of the Trojan War; in the Odyssey, the
return of Ulysses to Ithaca. These authors treat many things
which are not part of the plot, but parts outside of it; it is necessary,
however, that they be so connected that, although they can be
separated from it without detriment to it, nevertheless they should
appear to be derived from it and to be directed to the same end.3
"But, although it has this prerogative of being able to increase its
length so much, the subject-matter of the plot cannot deal with
things which happened in a longer space than a year."4

For Castelvetro the dramatic unity of action is only a conse-
quence of the unities of time and place, and hence subordinate to
them; and since, as we shall see later, he is not inclined to restrict

» Ibid., p. 29.
*/6id., p. 11.

J Ibid., p. 13.
« Ibid., p. 25.

395

•
•

108 RALPH C. WILLIAMS

the epic as to time and place, so the Aristotelian unity of action is
of relatively little importance to him. He has, in fact, a very broad
and inclusive idea of the unity of action as applied to the epic. He
repeats the Aristotelian precept that the plot should be one and
contain a single action of one person, but he follows this statement
with the assertion that the epic plot can relate not only one but
many actions.1 The epic, then, can have a great number of actions.
The question to be determined, consequently, is the meaning which
Castelvetro gives to the word " action." Is he here making " action "
synonymous with "plot" as he does elsewhere,2 or is he speaking
literally of the deeds of the personages which will be included in one
plot, as he does in another passage?3 The latter interpretation
seems to accord more with the general statement of his principles.
He contends, for example, that there are numerous ways of uniting
many different actions and of making them become one action and
one body, as for instance, the method of adhering to a limited time
or place, reputing many actions one because they happen at the
same time or in the same place.4 The mere fact that the actions
occur at the same time, however, is not sufficient, for coincidence of
actions does not necessarily entail any interrelationship of events.
Those epic poets err who write of actions which happened at one
time to one person or more, when there is no interdependence in
the happenings.5 One can be reasonably sure, then, that when
Castelvetro joins the words "plot" and "action" he means the
main action, just as we speak of it, and elsewhere he desires to
signify the deeds of the personages.

He repeats the idea already expressed by Robortelli, Giraldi,
and Vettori, that beginning, middle, and end can first be considered
in a large whole, and can then be considered in some part of that
whole, as if that part were another whole somewhat smaller.6 The

» Castelvetro, Poetica d' Aristotele, Basilea, MDLXXVI, p. 179.

» "Ma ci dobbiamo ricordare .... che non si pu6 far tragedia che sia lodevole, la
quale non habbia due attioni, cifi 6, due favole, quantunque 1'una sia principale, 1'altra
accessoria" (p. 692); and again, "Se le cose imaginate sono piu, le imagini debbano
essere piu, e per conseguente, che la favola, la quale 6 imagine dell'attione, sia uno, o
piu, secondo che 1'attione 6 uno, o piu."

» " Non ha dubbio niuno, che, se nell' historia si narra sotto un raccontamento piu
attioni d'una persona sola .... nella poesia si potrH sotto una favola narrate senza
biasimo pul attioni d'una persona sola." Of. p. 178.

« Ibid., p. 181. * Ibid., p. 507. • Ibid., p. 511.

396

EPIC UNITY IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY

109

Trojan War, which lasted ten years, would be considered a perfect
action, and the wrath of Achilles, which is a part of the aforesaid
war, considered by itself, would be regarded as another perfect
action. The explanation of the matter lies in the fact that for
Castelvetro the unity of action is not the result of any necessity but
is merely the effect of the desire on the part of the author to show
greater excellence.1 He contends that Homer did not adopt the
unity of action as a result of the restriction in time and place, but
that the real reason for the adherence to such a unity was that
Homer considered the singularity of action more beautiful.2 Castel-
vetro declares, and with more than mild disapproval, that Aristotle
can adduce no other reason or proof than the example of the tragic
poets and of Homer for this singularity of action. Such examples,
apparently, are not convincing to Castelvetro. What is more, he
proceeds to expound his theories of this broader unity of action in
direct opposition to the teaching of Aristotle. He opposes abso-
lutely the views of the Stagirite. "If we believe the words of
Aristotle" — and there is a strong implication that Castelvetro does
not — "we should have to blame Vida who composed the Cristiade,
in which are related many miraculous actions of Christ, because
like those poets blamed by Aristotle he narrated many actions of
one person. And furthermore (that is, if we believe the words of
Aristotle), we should not be able to commend as a well-constructed
plot that of the Iliad of Homer, for, although it contains a single
action (or rather a part of an action, according to Aristotle, that is,
a part of the Trojan War) it is not an action of a single person but
of a people, because that war was made by common consent of the
chiefs of the Greeks." "And so much the less should we be able
to consider" (that is, if we believe the words of Aristotle) as a well-
constructed plot that which not only contains many actions of one
person, or one action of many persons, but also many actions of
many persons."3 All this Castelvetro considers not only possible
but proper to include in the epic plot. He sees in the practice and
method of historians the example and justification of a similar pro-
cedure by the poets, inasmuch as for him poetry is an imitation
of history — rassomiglianza d'historia. If in history, he maintans,4

Ibid., pp. 179 and 504.

2 Ibid., p. 179.
397

» Ibid., p. 178. * Ibid.

110 RALPH C. WILLIAMS

one can narrate many actions of a single person, as Plutarch, Sue-
tonius, and others have done, there is no doubt that one can narrate
in poetry a single action of a whole people. After thus enlarging
the number of the personages to include a whole nation engaged in
one action, it is but a step for Castelvetro to justify the inclusion
of the many actions of a people such as those treated by Livy and
other historians. And if one concede as permissible many actions
of one people, it is readily recognized that many actions of many
people can be admitted into the narration of the heroic poem.1
Such, then, is the latitude with which Castelvetro treats the unity
of action.

But just as we shall see in his treatment of the unities of time
and place, Castelvetro the radical becomes Castelvetro the conserva-
tive by the added assertion that, after all, the poet displays in a
marked manner his judgment and industry when he treats a plot
comprising but a single action of a single person (a plot, that is,
which at first sight would not appear capable of causing pleasure to
the hearers) in such a way that he causes the readers as much delight
as other poets can scarcely cause with many actions of many persons.2
And although he would permit unusual freedom in the unity of
action, his basic belief is summarized in the words already cited:
"The epic ought to comprise one action of one person, not from
necessity, but for a demonstration of the excellence of the poet."3
It will be seen that he admits into the legitimate domain of the
epic the romanzi of which Giraldi, Pigna, and Minturno had con-
stituted a genre apart, although he did not entirely countenance the
" improper digressions" in the Orlando Furioso.*

Castelvetro deduced the dramatic unities of time and place from
the practice and the theory of the tragedy, and their application to
the epic is of secondary importance to him. Just as we have seen
that he treats in a broad way the unity of action, so does he assert,
regarding the unity of time, that the time of the action of the epic
is not determined, because the epic, narrating with words alone,
can relate an action which happened during the course of many
years and in diverse places, since the words may present to our minds

1 Castelvetro, op. tit., p. 179. * Ibid. * Ibid. « Ibid., p. 220.

398

EPIC UNITY IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY

111

things distant in time and place.1 The epic, then, not having to
conform to the restricted limits of time and place, like tragedy, can
relate an action which happened in many years, not in many days
only, and in places far distant, not in one place only.

Castelvetro does not agree with the commentators such as
Vettori, who believe, first, that Aristotle meant that the reading or
recitation (constitutione) of the epic should last as long as the pres-
entation of several tragedies, which are recited one after another
in one day; and secondly, that the epic should not be so long that
it cannot be read in a day. Although Aristotle had placed the dis-
cussion of the length of the presentation of tragedy outside the theory
of poetry, Castelvetro includes the question in his treatise, and,
identifying the time of the presentation with the time of the action of
the tragedy, disagrees with the first rule regarding the epic, because
many tragedies naturally ought not to be capable of being recited
in one day, one after another, according to his idea, for each tragedy
has its limits conformable to one turn of the sun. How then, he
asks, if each tragedy occupies a whole day, can several be recited
in one day, one after the other ?

Regarding the second rule, Castelvetro asks: "If the epic ought
not to exceed one day in reading, according to Aristotle, where
would be the divinity of Homer (who is so much admired by him),
who has made two epic poems, neither of which could be read even
in a few days"?2 Regarding these two points Castelvetro denies,
then, that the length of the epic should be equal to the number of
tragedies read in a day, and that the length of the epic is in reality
restricted to one day. He ascribes to the poem a length conformable
to the natural needs of the audience, and concludes that the epic
cannot be extended to such a length that it would be unreasonable
to recite it to the people at one time, that is, in as many hours as
the people could listen in comfort. Therefore the long epics are
divided into such lengths as are verisimile, so that the author may
comfortably recite and the auditors listen to him at a single time.

Castelvetro cannot believe that Homer would have committed
such an error as to continue twenty-four books without any division,

» Ibid., p. 109.

2 Ibid., p. 532.

399

112 RALPH C. WILLIAMS

reciting all of them at one time. The epic can divide its narration
into many books, which nevertheless do not contain more than one
action, and can recite one book per day without occasioning any
great difficulty in following the story.1 Despite this great freedom
in the unity of time, concludes Castelvetro (and this statement is
significant), the more the time of the action in the epic will be
restricted, the more praiseworthy it will be. The same is true of
the unity of place. The epic is not limited as regards place, for its
action can take place in heaven or hell, on land or sea, or in the air.
" Nevertheless, in the epic also, the more the place is restricted, the
more it is commendable and the more does the epic succeed."2

But Castelvetro, in spite of the singular breadth of vision which
we have noted, does not entirely escape from the tendency of the
typical sixteenth-century critic to impose rigorous restrictions on
the forms of literature. While apparently allowing extreme liberty,
he qualifies his assertions. The unity of action is not imperative,
but the poet who desires to show his excellence will strive for it;
the unity of time is not necessary, yet the more the time of the
action in the epic is restricted, the more praiseworthy it will be.
There are no limits regarding the place in which the epic action may
occur, yet the more limited the place, the more is the poem to be
commended.

RALPH C. WILLIAMS

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

» Castelvetro, op. ««., p. 110. * Ibid., p. 535.

400

Modern Philology

VOLUME XVIII

December 1920

NUMBER 8

A PLAUTINE SOURCE OF THE MERRY WIVES
OF WINDSOR

Up to the present time the sources of much of the plot of The
Merry Wives of Windsor have been untraced. In regard to these
portions of the play Neilson's summary expresses the opinion of
Shakespeare scholars: "The initial betrayal of Falstaff by Pistol
and Nym, the disguise as Mother Prat, the pinching by the fairies,
the underplot of the triple wooing of Anne Page, and all the characters
save the commonplace of the jealous husband, seem to be original."1

In fact, however, ever since Shakespeare's day a source for all
these elements of The Merry Wives, except the fairies' part of the
play (and a suggestion for that exists therein), has been readily
accessible to scholars, but it has been hitherto unnoticed. This
source is the comedy of Casino, by Plautus. That this drama served
as a direct source for all that part of The Merry Wives not founded
upon either The Two Lovers of Pisa or Philenio2 the writer hopes to

show in the following pages.

Before the question of Shakespeare's indebtedness to Plautus is
taken up, it seems best to review the existing theories as to the
originals of The Merry Wives. The first suggestion concerning a

1 Cambridge Shakespeare, p. 152.

2 These sources are later considered and their contribution to Shakespeare's comedy
defined.

4.01] 57 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, December, 1920

58 , R. S. FORSYTHE

source for the comedy occurs in Langbaine's Dramatic Poets.1 There
Langbaine calls attention to the resemblance in plot of the Shake-
spearian play to Lucius and Camillus, a novel in The Fortunate,
Deceived, and Unfortunate Lovers.2 He says that, although the
stories in the collection were written since Shakespeare's time
(the book was published in 1632), yet they are translations from the
novels of Cinthio and Malespini, thus leading the reader to infer
that Shakespeare, in Langbaine's opinion, had perhaps utilized an
original Italian story. Unfortunately, the tale is not to be found
in Cinthio, and Malespini's collection was not published until 1609,
so that such an inference would be decidedly wrong.

Steevens3 gives as possible sources tales from II Pecorone* of Ser
Giovanni Fiorentino and from the Piacevoli Notti5 of Straparola.
As quoted by Malone,6 Farmer advances The Two Lovers of Pisa,
a novel in Tarleton's News out of Purgatory, as a source. Malone
himself believed that the Windsor setting of the comedy was sug-
gested to its author by The Fishwife's Tale of Brentford in Westward
for Smelts and that the plot came from a combination of The Two
Lovers and Lucius and Camillus.7 Another tale from Straparola,
that of Filenio,8 has also been cited as a source.9 This story was
translated by Painter and appears as Novel 49, Tome I, of The
Palace of Pleasure.10 It is there entitled Philenio Sisterna.

These various tales have all been taken to refer to the plot of
the merry wives against Falstaff. In the story of Filenio and in
the English version, Philenio, we find the lover paying his addresses
simultaneously to three ladies who confide in each other and combine
to revenge themselves upon him for his triplicity, so to speak.

1 Ed. 1691, pp. 459-60. Gildon in his garbling of Langbaine omits any mention of
The Merry Wives.

2 Novel I. Reprinted by Hazlitt, Shakespeare's Library, III, 33 flf.
8 Quoted by Malone, Variorum Shakespeare, VIII, 3.

* Day I, Novel 2. * Night IV, Fable 4. « Loc. cit.

» Variorum Shakespeare, VIII, 210.

B Night II, Fable 2.

» See, for example, Neilson, op. cit., p. 152, or Hazlitt, Shakespeare's Library, Vol. Ill,
where the tale is reprinted.

10 Miss Porter and Miss Clark, in their First Folio edition of The Merry Wives, claim
to be the first to point out that Painter translated Straparola's novel. W. G. Waters,
however, in the notes to his translation of the Notti for the Society of Bibliophiles,
London, 1898, mentions Painter's translation of Filenio (IV, 283).

402

PLAUTINE SOURCE OF "MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR" 59

Straparola in Nerino of Portugal — merely translated in the News —
relates how a young man who is enamored of a lady unwittingly
keeps her husband informed of the progress of his suit to her and
how the husband seeks to take the two in flagrante delicto. To
escape capture by the jealous husband Nerino hides successively in
three places from his pursuers and so evades punishment. The
novel of Bucciuolo by Ser Giovanni and its English translation,
Lucius and Camillus, are similar to Nerino in their general outlines.
The sole resemblance1 of The Fishwife's Tale has been noted above.
Of these stories five may be eliminated as probable sources for
The Merry Wives. The Fishwife's Tale2 and Lucius and Camillus
appeared first respectively in 1620 and 1632 ;3 hence they are out
of the question as sources for the play. Ser Giovanni's novel (the
original of Lucius and Camillus) has been set aside by some scholars
because of their doubt as to Shakespeare's knowledge of Italian.4
For the same reason the Nerino and the Filenio of Straparola would
have to be passed over as sources. However, in regard to the
three novels just mentioned a better cause than Shakespeare's
problematical lack of knowledge of Italian exists for their rejection
as' probable originals for The Merry Wives. Both Bucciuolo and
Nerino closely approach in their plots The Two Lovers of Pisa;
indeed that tale is a mere translation of Nerino. Therefore, the
English novel may as well be a source as either of the Italian nar-
ratives. Besides, when an English version was available, one, more-
over, contained in such a work as Tarleton's News, which traded
upon the popularity of a famous comedian, and which was hence
surely known to Shakespeare, it seems absurd to suppose that the

1 Unless we find a very general and equally vague resemblance in the fact that both
the play and the tale have to do with jealous husbands.

2 However, Lee, Life of William Shakespeare, p. 247, gives, with The Two Lovers,
Ser Giovanni's novel and The Fishwife's Tale as sources for Shakespeare's play.

8 Lee, ibid., quotes Malone and Steevens as saying that there was an edition of
Westward for Smelts in 1603. As The Merry Wives was printed in 1602 and perhaps was
first acted three or four years earlier, the situation is not altered. Malone, Variorum
Shakespeare, VIII, 210, conjectures that the tales in The Fortunate .... Lovers had
appeared in English by Shakespeare's time. There is no evidence, however, of any
edition of this work earlier than that of 1632.

4 See Neilson, op. dt. The writer does not subscribe to the idea of Shakespeare's
ignorance of Italian, for he knows of no good grounds on which to found such a belief.

403

60 €1. S. FORSYTHE

dramatist resorted to an Italian original.1 For the same reason one
appears justified in considering that Shakespeare used Painter's
translation of Filenio as found in The Palace of Pleasure and not the
text of Straparola. It would seem then that The Two Lovers of
Pisa (an English translation from the Italian published about 1590)
and Philenio Sisterna (a translation also from the Italian dating from
1566) are the sources of The Merry Wives now usually recognized.2
A comparison, however, of The Two Lovers and the play shows
that but part of the plot of the latter can be founded upon the novel.
Nor, indeed, would the indebtedness really be any greater with any
of the other versions of the same story named above.3 The Two
Lovers of Pisa resembles in nothing but its barest outlines a portion
of the plot of The Merry Wives? and the inclusion of Philenio as a
source accounts for only one additional element in the play and that
a minor one. To supply the hitherto unknown source for these
apparently original portions of The Merry Wives is, then, the writer's
task, and, as he has said, he believes that he has discovered that
source in the Casina of Plautus.

Ill

The most obvious resemblance of The Merry Wives to Casina is
in the subplot of the former, that is to say, in the part of the Shake-
spearian play which deals with the wooing of Anne Page. Here
Dr. Caius and Slender are suitors for the hand of Anne. Caius is
favored by the mother, Slender by the father. Anne, however,

1 Hazlitt seems to have been of the opinion that Shakespeare used The Two Lovers
as a source for The Merry Wives rather than any other novel. He points out specific
resemblances between the story and the play in his Shakespeare's Library, III, 66, note;
67, note; 69, note; 72, note.

2 See Neilson, op. cit., p. 152; Hart, The Merry Wives (Arden ed.), Introduction,
p. Ixxxi. Pleay's claim, Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, II, 161, that the
plot of Wily Beguiled "is identical with the Anne Page story" is rashly made. There
is a very vague resemblance but nothing more.

a In Bucciuolo and in Lucius and Camillus the lover, upon the occasion of his first
surprise by the husband, is hidden by his mistress under a pile of half-dry linen. Upon
the next visit of the lover he is hidden elsewhere, and the unlucky husband searches the
pile of clothing. There is no basket and the clothes are not dirty, as in The Merry
Wives. In The Two Lovers Lionello is hidden in "a great driefatte full of feathers."
Of. Hazlitt, Shakespeare's Library, III, 66, note.

4 The most important differences between the novel and the play are pointed out
later.

404

PLAUTINE SOURCE OF " MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR" 61

dislikes both these lovers, and herself prefers Fenton, a man of higher
birth than either she or they. Each of the two parents intends to
carry through a plot unknown to the other whereby Anne would be
stolen away from a masquerade (the culmination of the trick on
Falstaff) and wedded to one of the favored suitors. Both Caius
and Slender run away with persons dressed as they have been told
Anne would be clad, but return in great disgust, for in each case the
supposed girl has turned out to be a boy in disguise. The imposture
is discovered by each after the marriage ceremony has been per-
formed. Then Fenton and Anne enter, and, disclosing that they
have eloped and have been married, receive the parental blessing.

In Casina, Euthynicus is in love with the slave Casina. Lysi-
damus, his father, who also is enamored of her, purposes to marry
her to Olympio, his bailiff. Cleustrata, mother to Euthynicus and
wife to Lysidamus, suspecting her husband's passion for the girl,
favors her marriage to Chalinus, armor-bearer to Euthynicus. It
seems understood that the newly wed husband (whether he is
Olympio or Chalinus) shall act with suitable complacency toward
his own master (Lysidamus or Euthynicus). After much squab-
bling between the two parties lots are drawn to determine which
candidate shall wed Casina. Olympio wins and he and his master
prepare for the wedding. After the feast Olympio is to pretend to
start with his bride for Lysidamus' villa, but is in reality to repair
with her to the home of a neighbor, Alcesimus, where his place is
to be taken by his master. Discovering this plan through the means
of Chalinus, Cleustrata disguises Chalinus as Casina, and he sets
out with Olympio. Cleustrata, Myrrhina, her friend and wife to
Alcesimus, and Pardalisca, a slave, watch outside the home of
Alcesimus after the bridal couple accompanied by Lysidamus have
entered it. First, Olympio reappears. After the bailiff has solilo-
quized upon the beating administered to him by the false bride and
has related the particulars to Cleustrata, Lysidamus enters in great
trepidation and confusion. Chalinus follows shortly in his feminine
costume and confronts the' two, who apparently have become aware
of the supposed bride's sex and identity (the play is very defective
near the end). Lysidamus asks his wife to forgive him; this she
does and the two are reconciled. The epilogue states that Casina

405

62 it. S. FORSYTHE

will be discovered to be a free woman, the daughter of Alcesimus,
and that thereupon she will be married to Euthynicus.

We find in both plays, then, the man and wife urging the claims
of their respective candidates for the hand of a young girl (in Casino,
a slave, not a daughter). The maiden is in love with a third person
— the son of the house in Plautus. A mock wedding occurs in which
the bride's part is taken by a male, and from which results the
discomfiture of the bridegroom (two of these ceremonies take place
in The Merry Wives). Finally, the true lovers are united. Further-
more, the mother in both plays is assisted by a friend and by a
female servant.

In other respects the stories of the two plays resemble each
other, and this likeness extends into the main plot of The Merry
Wives. In the same manner as Cleustrata 'and Myrrhina conspire
in Casina to bring Lysidamus to shame, Mrs. Page and Mrs. Ford
in Shakespeare's comedy devise ways to expose the credulous
amorousness of Falstaff to the general ridicule.1

It should be noted, also, that the merry wives make three
attempts to break Falstaff of his passion for Mrs. Ford. Cleustrata
in Casina tries three times after the lot-drawing (the beginning of
Lysidamus' plot) to divert her husband from his pursuit of Casina.
First, she attempts to embroil him with Alcesimus, whose house is
necessary to the plan (III, i, ii, iv) ; next, she instigates Pardalisca's
story to Lysidamus of Casina's madness in the hope of frightening
him away from the girl (III, v) ; finally, she exposes him by means
of the false Casina (V). In both plays the first two tricks are
unsuccessful; the last stratagems, in each play the most elaborate,
are successful. The final disgrace of both Falstaff and Lysidamus
takes place before more of the dramatis personae than do the earlier
attempted tricks; that is, they are more public.

Myrrhina — somewhat too philosophically perhaps — affects no
jealousy of her husband Alcesimus. Likewise, Page expresses his

1 In Philenio the three offended ladies do not publicly make Philenio a laughing-
stock; in fact his revenge in turn upon them is more in spirit like the merry wives' trick
upon Falstafl1. Also each of the three ladies in the story plays a trick upon Philenio.
That person, besides, is a young man, whereas Falstafl1 is advanced in years.

406

PLATJTINE SOURCE OF " MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR" 63

faith in his wife and refuses to believe that she would listen to
Falstaff 's lovemaking (II, i, 142 ff.). Just as Chalinus is privy to
Cleustrata's devices against her husband and Olympio, so does
Robin, Falstaff's page lent by him to Mrs. Page, undoubtedly under-
stand what the two women are projecting against his master.

In Plautus' comedy, Chalinus, overhearing the plans of Lysida-
mus and Olympio, betrays them to Cleustrata, who sets in motion
her counterplot for humiliating the conspirators. So Pistol and
Nym, to thwart Falstaff's proposed seduction of Mrs. Ford and
Mrs. Page, inform Ford and Page of their late patron's intention.
Furthermore, as the old satyr Lysidamus is the butt of Casino,, so
is Falstaff the "vlouting stog" of The Merry Wives. The sup-
posedly fortunate suitor of Casina, likewise, comes to grief, just as
do the favored Caius and Slender in Shakespeare's play.

The scene of Casina is removed by Shakespeare from Greece to
the Windsor of Henry IV's reign, and the Grecian citizens and
slaves are transformed into a group of burgesses, country gentle-
men, courtiers, and their hangers-on. Aside from its being mingled
with the matter of at least one Elizabethan tale (or two, if the
Philenio is counted), many other changes have been made in Casina,
both in the action and in the characters.

In The Merry Wives the plot is built around two points: one,
the jealousy of Ford, the other, the wooing of Anne Page. In
Casina, however, the two are combined, and the hoodwinking of
the old debauchee goes with the mock marriage. Jealousy is present
in the Plautine comedy, but it is interwoven with the courtship
motive. Cleustrata is jealous of her disreputable old husband
Lysidamus and is nagging at him constantly. Shakespeare has
turned the tables and has set a jealous husband to watching his
wife. One should remember, also, that the disguise of Chalinus as
the bride Casina deceives two persons, the husband Olympio and
Lysidamus, while in The Merry Wives there are two bogus brides
for the two deceived wooers. Plautus gives us no love scenes between
Euthynicus and Casina; indeed, neither appears during the course
of the action. Shakespeare, however, not only shows his young

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64 ,R. S. FORSYTHE

lovers together, but brings them on the stage married at the conclu-
sion of the play.

Howe recorded1 the tradition that Queen Elizabeth, having been
highly pleased with Falstaff in Henry IV, commanded Shakespeare
to write a play showing the knight in love. The Merry Wives,
Howe tells us, was the result. This story gains in credibility when
we consider how The Two Lovers is altered. The aged Falstaff is
made its hero instead of the young Lionello. The necessity of
bringing Falstaff in as the would-be seducer — since he could hardly
figure as the husband — accounts for this change in character. No
doubt, too, the influence of Lysidamus in Casino, contributes some-
what to this alteration.

The plot of the Plautine play is considerably changed in minor
points in order to admit Falstaff into it. In Casina, Lysidamus, the
prototype of Page, is old, cowardly, debauched, credulous, vain,
and perseveringly amorous. Naturally enough these traits go to
Falstaff, who had them with certain saving graces already indeed in
Henry IV. Earlier critics have derived Falstaff from various
classical originals — from the boasting soldier, as Pyrgopolinices in
Miles Gloriosus,2 or from the parasite, as Ergasilus in Captivi. How-
ever, a figure in Latin comedy which resembles Falstaff closely has
hitherto been overlooked. This is that of the licentious old man,
such as is Antipho in Stichus or especially Lysidamus in Casina.
In fact it seems probable that the likeness of Lysidamus to Falstaff
first suggested to Shakespeare the use of Casina as a source for The
Merry Wives. Lysidamus is in love, it should be remembered. If
we put credence in Howe's tradition, which is mentioned above, we
see here another reason why this particular Latin play would have
appealed to Shakespeare as a source.

Lee says in his Life of Shakespeare* of the chief character of The
Merry Wives: "Although Falstaff is the central figure, he is a mere
caricature of his former self. His power of retort has decayed, and

1 In his "Account" of Shakespeare's life, Works (ed. 1709), I, viil-ix.

2 For example, see J. Thiimmel's article, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, XIII, 1-12, and
particularly Reinhardstoettner, Plautus, pp. 671 ft*.

* See p. 152.

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PLAUTINE SOURCE OF " MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR" 65

the laugh invariably turns against him. In name only is he identical
with the potent humorist of 'Henry IV.' ' With this opinion all
readers of the play are in agreement. Why then should the Falstaff
of The Merry Wives be no longer the Falstaff of Henry IV? The
answer is that he is influenced by the Lysidamus of Casina. From
the ready and resourceful old rascal of the historical plays he has
become a gull — easily hoodwinked and falling into trap after trap,
exactly the same kind of character as Lysidamus. In explanation
of this fact it may be said by some critics that the unfortunate, but
later successful, lover of The Two Lovers is transformed into the
same figure. This is of course true, but Falstaff and Lionello both
have been made over upon the model of the Lysidamus of Plautus.

The variations in The Merry Wives from the plots of the novels
will be given below to show how far Shakespeare was from a blind
following of The Two Lovers or of Philenio and how he adapted
them as he did Casina.

In The Two Lovers the jealous husband Mutio is a very old man
("his age about fourscore") and his wife Margaret is young. Her
lover Lionello is "a young Gentleman," who is attracted to her by
her beauty, not by her husband's wealth. Their affection is genuine
and mutual. Lionello confides his passion for Margaret to her
husband "for that hee was olde and knewe much, and was a Physi-
tion that with his drugges might helpe him forward in his purposes,"
and requests Mutio's aid in his suit to the lady, ignorant of course
that she is the old doctor's wife. Thrice does Mutio surprise the
two together; once Lionello escapes by hiding in a hamper filled with
feathers, the next time by concealing himself in a nook between the
floors, and the third time by being shut up in a chest of papers
which is carried out from Mutio's country house when it has been
fired by the jealous old man. Lionello does not suspect that his
mistress and Mutio are man and wife until, as he is telling the
story of his amours to Mutio and his brothers-in-law, he is warned
of the facts in the case by Margaret's sending him a cup of wine with
a ring in it which he has given her. He then turns the matter off
by alleging that his stories to Mutio have been false and that he has
told them to play upon the physician's jealousy. After this Mutio
is mocked until he dies of chagrin; the lovers are then married.

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66 H. S. FORSYTHE

In Philenio the hero makes love to three women, who learn from
each other of his courtship of them and plan accordingly to revenge
the slight upon him. They separately arrange assignations with
Philenio in the course of which he is badly mishandled. Learning
how the ladies have duped him, he in turn revenges himself upon
them. In the Shakespearian play there are but two ladies and
Falstaff makes no effort to avenge himself upon them for their
treatment of him. The sole resemblances are in the making love
to more than one woman, their finding out this fact, and paying the
lover off for his indiscretion.

The couple who are attempting to direct a marriage in Shake-
speare's comedy have no other point of disagreement than that
which arises from the marrying of their daughter. That is to say,
Shakespeare has taken the Lysidamus and Cleustrata of Plautus,
has reversed their jealousy, making it unfounded incidentally, and
has given it to his Ford and Mrs. Ford. The sole attribute of Lysi-
damus and Cleustrata preserved by Page and his wife is their con-
flict over Anne's suitors (in Plautus over those of Casina). On the
other hand, their friends, the Fords, have the jealousy of Cleustrata
and the intriguing of Lysidamus with the important difference that
the husband is the jealous person and that his wife has no intention
of being unfaithful to him. In other respects the Fords correspond
to Alcesimus and Myrrhina, neighbors and friends of Lysidamus
and Cleustrata.

Shakespeare's Shallow was probably introduced into the play
because a second foolish old man seemed necessary to act as a foil
to Falstaff, as Alcesimus in Casina sets off Lysidamus. The slave
Casina is changed by Shakespeare into Page's daughter Anne, an
heiress. It is important to note here again that in the Plautine
epilogue Casina is stated to be the long-lost daughter of Alcesimus,
and hence a free woman. If we consider that Shakespeare effected
this alteration in the degree of his heroine before the opening of his
comedy, instead of after its conclusion, the resemblance of the char-
acter is still more striking.

The two candidates for the hand of Casina — Olympio and
Chalinus — Shakespeare has transformed, respectively, into Slender,
Page's preference as a son-in-law, and Doctor Caius, Mrs. Page's

410

PLAUTINE SOURCE OF "MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR" 67

choice. Shakespeare's Pistol and Nym, who revenge themselves
upon Falstaff by revealing his projects to Page and Ford, play a
portion of the part of Plautus' Chalinus, who betrays to his mistress
his master's plans in regard to Casina. The mutes who are stolen
away from the fairy dance in Windsor Forest by Slender and Caius
exercise the function of Chalinus as a bride. Dame Quickly is a
Shakespearian version of the mischievous Pardalisca, maid to
Cleustrata. Finally, it is not impossible that the Host of the Garter
is expanded from the Plautine cook, Chytrio.

These redistributions of traits and remodelings of characters,
which may seem complicated but which are not in fact difficult to
follow, can best be summarized in tabular form:

Casina The Merry Wives

Lysidamus Sir John Falstaff

Lysidamus George Page

Alcesimus Ford

Alcesimus Robert Shallow

Euthynicus Fenton

Euthynicus William Page

Olympio Abraham Slender

Chalinus Doctor Caius

Chalinus Pistol

Chalinus Nym

Chalinus Fairies in green and white

Chytrio Host of the Garter

Myrrhina Mrs. Ford

Cleustrata Mrs. Page

Casina Anne Page

Pardalisca Mrs. Quickly

All the characters of Plautus are therefore, at least, paralleled
in some form or other by Shakespeare. Only Sir Hugh, Bardolph,
Robin, Simple, and Rugby are obtained from sources other than Casina
or the novelle. Of these Bardolph1 and the page occur in Henry IV,

1 It is not impossible that Shakespeare's choice of the name Bardolph as a designa-
tion for Falstaff's red-nosed follower was a jest directed at a friend and colleague. In
Shakespeare's England, II, 82-83, Oswald Barren quotes from a pamphlet, A brief Dis-
course of the causes of Discord amongst the officers of arms and of the great abuses and
absurdities comitted by painters to the great prejudice and hindrance of the same office, the
author of which was William Smith, Rouge Dragon Pursuivant: "Phillipps the player
had graven in a gold ring the arms of Sir William Phillipp, Lord Bardolph, with the said
L. Bardolph's cote quartred " This pamphlet dates from 1599. There seems a

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68 K. S. FORSYTHE

Part II, as does Shallow, who takes over some of Alcesimus' func-
tions. Sir Hugh, Simple, and Rugby are not found in any other
Shakespearian play, nor is there a hint in Casino, for any one of them,
unless it be that Sir Hugh's part was suggested by the fight between
Olympio and Chalinus in II, vi.

VII

In the pages which follow, the relationship of The Merry Wives
to Casino, will be shown in detail. The various passages in Shake-
speare's play which seem founded upon Plautus' comedy will be
taken up in order.1

First,2 Falstaff's belief that the wives of Page and Ford look
upon him with favor, as expressed in I, iii, 48 ff., is derived from
Casina (II, iii, 226-27) . Here, after telling how he employs perfumes
to make himself agreeable to Casina, Lysidamus says,
. . . . Et placeo, ut videor.

So Falstaff says of Mrs. Ford,

.... She gives the leer of invitation. I can construe the action of her
familiar style; and the hardest voice of her behaviour, to be English'd
rightly, is "I am Sir John Falstaff's."

The agreement of Pistol and Nym that they shall revenge them-
selves upon Sir John for his casting them off by informing Ford and
Page of the knight's contemplated suits to their respective wives
(I, iii, 99 ff.), seems suggested by the soliloquies and eavesdropping
of Chalinus (Casina, II, vii, viii; III, ii). In the first scene cited,
Chalinus, depressed by the victory of Olympio in the lot-drawing

chance that the dramatist, by way of poking fun at Augustine Phillips' pretensions of
descent from the Lord Bardolph of Agincourt, supplied the actor with a Bardolph of
that period — specially invented — from whom he might, according to the facetious Shake-
speare, be descended. Such might be the explanation of the Bardolph and Lord Bar-
dolph of Henry IV, Part II. Surely it is possible that if in The Merry Wives the poet
ridicules the family of Lucy he would not hesitate to laugh at a brother-actor.

1 References are to the second edition of Lindsay's Plautus in the Scriptorum Clas-
sicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis and to Neilson's Shakespeare in the Cambridge Poets
Series.

2 Possibly Shakespeare in The Merry Wives, 1, i, 10-11, meant to pun upon the
Latin and English meanings of "armiger." To the Roman the word denoted "armor-
bearer," a kind of servant; to the Englishman, "arms-bearer," or gentleman. Slender
calls Shallow "armigero," and in Casina, II, iii, 257, occur the words, "armigero nili
atque inproba" ("to the armor-bearer, worthless and base"). It should be noted that
here we find the dative case of the word, the same form which Slender improperly uses.

412

PLAUTINE SOURCE OF " MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR" 69

of II, vi, expresses his disappointment. When Lysidamus and
Olympio enter (II, viii), Chalinus, eager for revenge, conceals himself
in such a way as to overhear their conversation. The master and
his bailiff discuss their plans, and Lysidamus explains his project
of Olympic's taking Casina to the house of Alcesimus, where he has
arranged that the occupants shall be out of the way. Understand-
ing now fully the grounds for Lysidamus' persistence in backing
Olympic's suit and anxious for vengeance upon his rival, Chalinus
hurries from the stage to reveal to his mistress what he has learned.
This revelation of the perfidy of Lysidamus takes place off stage
(Pistol and Nym betray Falstaff to Page and Ford before they enter
[The Merry Wives, II, i]), but occurs by the time of Cleustrata's
entrance at the opening of III, ii. Her jealousy before this time,
it should be noticed, has been based upon suspicion, rather than
upon actual knowledge. It may be well to call attention here to
the fact that Ford is much disturbed over Pistol's tidings as likewise
is Cleustrata over those of Chalinus, which she has just heard
when she comes in at the opening of III, ii.

The next evidence of indebtedness to Casina in The Merry
Wives appears in II, i. The scene in both plays is in the street.
Mrs. Page enters and reads Falstaff's letter to herself. While she
is indignantly vowing revenge, Mrs. Ford comes in. The two
compare the letters which they have received from Falstaff. They
then resolve to trick him. In Casina, II, ii, Cleustrata and Myrrhina
meet as each is going to the other's house, the former intending to
confide her troubles to her friend. Parts of their dialogue are taken
over literally by Shakespeare. This is shown below.

Mrs. Ford: Mistress Page! trust me, I was going to your house.

Mrs. Page: And, trust me, I was coming to you. You look very ill
[11. 33 ffj.

Then Mrs. Page repeatedly asks the cause of her friend's trouble,
until Mrs. Ford tells her of Falstaff's letter. Upon meeting Cleu-
strata, Myrrhina says (Casina, II, ii, 172 ff.),

Sed quid tu es tristis, amabo ?

to which Cleustrata replies that her sadness is owing to her husband's
follies and adds,

Nam ego ibam ad te.
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70 R. S. FORSYTHE

Myrrhina responds,

Et pol ego isto ad te.

She continues,

Sed quid est quod tuo nunc animo aegrest ?
Nam quod tibi est aegre, idem mist diuidiae.

It is only after some further persuasion, however, that she induces
Cleustrata to share her troubles.

The comments of Mrs. Page (11. 20-31) and of Mrs. Ford (11.
64 ff., 101 ff.) upon their missives and their vows of revenge are
founded upon Cleustrata's expression of her opinion of the character
of her husband, Lysidamus, and her threats of starving and insult-
ing him. In connection with this, it should be noted that Mrs. Ford
suggests that the best way to punish Falstaff is "to entertain him
with hope, till the wicked fire of lust have melted him in his own
grease." Thus, Mrs. Ford, like Cleustrata, seeks vengeance upon
her tormentor.1

This dialogue of Cleustrata and Myrrhina breaks off at the
approach of Lysidamus. Myrrhina leaves the stage while Cleus-
trata steps aside. Likewise, the merry wives are interrupted by the
entrance of their husbands, who are accompanied by Pistol and
Nym. Both women then retire to the rear of the stage. The pas-
sage in The Merry Wives, II, i, 106-12, runs thus:

Mrs. Page: Why, look where he comes [Ford] ; and my good man too.
He's as far from jealousy as I am from giving him cause; and that I Hope
is an unmeasurable distance.

Mrs. Ford: You are the happier woman.

Mrs. Page: Let's consult together against this greasy knight. Come
hither.

In Casina (II, ii, 213-16) occurs this bit of dialogue:

CL: st! tace.

My.: quid est?

CL: em!

My.: quis est, quern vides ?

CL: uir eccum it. intro abi, adpropera, age amabo.

My.: impetras, abeo.

i Here seems to be a borrowing from Philenio. The meeting of the three loves of
Philenio and their exchanging confidences through which they learn of Philenio's
addresses to each seems the source. For the three tricks upon Falstaff later on in The
Merry Wives a hint, and little else, appears to have come from Philenio.

PLAUTINE SOURCE OF ''MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR" 71

CL: mox magis quom otium et mihi et tibi erit, igitur tecum loquar,
mine vale.

My.: valeas.

Mrs. Page's "Look where he comes" is a nearly literal translation
of Cleustrata's "uir eccum it."

Casina, II, iii, is a scene between Cleustrata and the newly
arrived Lysidamus in which a quarrel arises, the beginning of
which has been utilized by Shakespeare in The Merry Wives, II, i,
155 ff. After Pistol and his companion have left the stage, the
two women advance to their husbands. Upon addressing Ford,
Mrs. Ford is very sharply answered by him. As Cleustrata attempts
to leave the stage, but is hindered by Lysidamus, so, reversing the
action, Shakespeare has Ford bid his wife go home.

The quarrel between Caius and Evans which terminates in the
abortive duel, I, iv; II, iii; III, i, has as one source the dispute of
Olympic and Chalinus at the opening of Casina (I, i). The two
slaves show first in this scene their rivalry for the hand of Casina.
The other Plautine source for the duel is to be found in II, vi,
404 ff . Having arranged that the slaves shall draw lots for Casina,
Lysidamus and Cleustrata (in much the same manner as the Host
of the Garter brings about the farcical meeting of Caius and Evans)
meddle with the hatred their servants have for each other and egg
them on to exchanging blows.

The dialogues between Page and Caius, and Page and Fenton,
III, ii, 61 ff., in which he tells them that he favors neither of them
but Slender instead as a husband for his daughter Anne, are based
upon Casina, II, iii, iv, v, vi. In these scenes Lysidamus and
Cleustrata emphasize their support of the suits of Olympio and of
Chalinus, respectively, for Casina. The Merry Wives, III, iv, 82 ff.,
shows Shakespeare's use of Cleustrata's part in the passages above
cited. There, on being asked by Fenton for her good offices, Mrs.
Page responds that she desires a better husband than Slender for
Anne, but does not agree to aid Fenton. As Mrs. Quickly observes,
Caius is the mother's choice.

Casina, III, v, which is one of the longest and most amusing
scenes in the play, is the source of a number of passages in The Merry
Wives. Pardalisca, Cleustrata's maid, enters in a pretended fright,

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72 ft. S. FORSYTHE

and after much persuasion on his part tells her master, Lysidamus,
that Casina has become insane at the idea of marriage and, having
got possession of two swords, has terrorized the occupants of the
house. Lysidamus, however, is not to be diverted from his purpose,
and he vows that insane or sane Casina shall be married as he has
planned.

First, a hint for Falstaff' s escape from the jealous Ford in the
basket of soiled linen1 (III, iii) occurs in Casina, III, v, 664. There
Pardalisca tells how the household, to avoid the mad fury of Casina,
hid under boxes and beds. The terror of Falstaff at Ford's approach
in the scene above cited corresponds to that of Lysidamus in the
Plautine play when Pardalisca tells him of Casina's threat against
his life.2

Fenton's bribe to Mrs. Quickly to secure her in his interest (III,
iv, 104) seems founded upon Lysidamus' presents to Pardalisca
(11. 708 ff.). Lysidamus' intention is by means of them to influence
the maid so that she will entreat Cleustrata to prevail on Casina to
lay aside the arms which Pardalisca reports she has taken up. Thus
it will be safe for Lysidamus to enter the house.

Next, Mrs. Quickly's errand (IV, v) is based upon Pardalisca's
acting as an emissary of Cleustrata in the same scene.8 Mrs.
Quickly's aim, like that of Pardalisca, is to draw the prospective old
dupe — Falstaff in The Merry Wives, Lysidamus in Casina — into
the trap set by the wives. First, however, Pardalisca attempts,
apparently by means of her story of Casina's frenzy, to dis-
suade Lysidamus from proceeding further in his intrigue, but she is
unsuccessful in her endeavor. There is nothing to correspond in The
Merry Wives. There Mrs. Quickly's sole object is so to manage
that Falstaff shall agree to meet the two women in Windsor Forest,
and it is only after some difficulty that she accomplishes it in V, i.

1 This incident is almost certainly derived from The Two Lovers, yet the fact that a
suggestion for it occurs in the Latin play should not be overlooked, since Plautus' inci-
dent may have aided in impressing Shakespeare with the comic possibilities of the
trick.

2 Here again the Latin play and the English novel both offer sources for incidents in
The Merry Wives.

* Old women carry messages for the lovers in Bucciuolo, in Lucius and Camillus,
and in Nerino, but their part differs from Mrs. Quickly's and Pardalisca's. There is
no such character in The Two Lovers of Pisa.

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CINE SOURCE OF "MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR"

It is by no means improbable that Mrs. Quickly's story to
Falstaff of the treatment accorded Mrs. Ford by her brutally jealous
husband (IV, v, 112 ff.) is based upon Pardalisca's circumstantial
story of Casina's insane fury.

Falstaff' s misadventures in disguise as the witch of Brainford,
as related by him to Mrs. Quickly (IV, v, 117ff.), are based upon
Casina, V, ii, iii, iv.1 Here Olympio and Lysidamus respectively
reveal how they have been pommeled by the supposed Casina.2

Falstaff' s persistence in his pursuit of the merry wives, as shown
in V, i, seems suggested by the infatuation of Lysidamus for Casina,
as displayed, for instance, in Casina, III, vi, in which the old satyr
takes tamely insult after insult from Olympio. Lysidamus dares
not offend the bailiff because of the important part which is
played by him in the plot against Casina. Also, III, v, of Plautus'
comedy should be compared. There, Pardalisca's sensational story
of Casina's wild insanity has no effect upon Lysidamus' determina-
tion to carry out his plans.

Scenes ii and iii of the fifth act of The Merry Wives, in which Page
and his wife are shown each endeavoring to outwit the other by
arranging that Slender and Caius, respectively, shall steal away
Anne from the coming masquerade, would appear founded upon
Casina, II, v, vi. Here Lysidamus and Cleustrata encourage
Olympio and Chalinus to persist in their rivalry for Casina and
finally resort to the lots to determine which shall have her. In
both plays we have the same determination on the part of husband
and wife to carry through their plans to a successful conclusion.
And in both the cherished schemes are later wrecked — Cleustrata
in Casina contriving the failure of Lysidamus' project, whereas Mrs.
Page, though she succeeds in circumventing her husband, is tricked
as well as he.

The culmination of the tricks upon Falstaff (The Merry
Wives, V, v) owes much more to Casina than to The Two Lovers
of Pisa. Here in Shakespeare's comedy the amorous old gull is
finally exposed to the ridicule of nearly all the characters of the

1 Falstaff 's confidences to "Master Brook" (III, v) are derived from the novel.

2 The scene as presented by Shakespeare (IV, ii) should be compared. There is
no disguise of the sort in The Two Lovers or in any of the other novels.

417

74 R. S. FOKSYTHE

play, while Caius and Slender are tricked too. The fifth act of
Casina deals with the working out of Cleustrata's plot against
her husband and his accomplice, Olympio. In V, i, of Casina
the women of the play wait outside the house of Alcesimus, into
which the bridal party has gone, just as the characters of The Merry
Wives lie in ambush in Windsor Forest for Falstaff. Olympio
enters in great haste in V, ii. On being examined, he tells how
his supposed wife has beaten him. Next, Lysidamus enters (V, iii).
After he has soliloquized over his treatment by "Casina," Chalinus
in his disguise confronts his master (V, iv). The old man endeavors
to deny any attempt upon "Casina," but he is unable to convince
Cleustrata of his truthfulness. At last he throws himself on her
mercy, professing his repentance for his past ill conduct.

These four Plautine scenes are the predominant source for the
exposure of Falstaff s foolish credulity. Only a very faint sug-
gestion for them is to be found in the Italian or English novels. In
both Casina and The Merry Wives the intention of the principal
female characters is the same — to humiliate an old lecher. They
lie in wait while the process is in progress. It is shown on the
English stage, but related on the Latin. After attempting to carry
away the situation the tricked character — Lysidamus in one play,
Falstaff in the other — owns himself vanquished and asks for mercy.
The latter speaks of "the guiltiness" of his mind (1. 129), while
Lysidamus in good set terms asks his wife's forgiveness. In the
meantime, in both plays the other characters mock their dupes.
The pinching which Falstaff undergoes from the fairies is perhaps
suggested by the beating which Chalinus as Casina administers to
Lysidamus, an incident which had already served as a source for
Falstaff 's misfortunes as the witch of Brainford.

The conclusion of the subplot of Anne Page and her lovers is
founded upon this last act of Casina. In The Merry Wives} Caius
steals away a fairy in green from the masquerade, believing "her"
to be Anne. Slender elopes with a fairy in white. Each is follow-
ing the directions given him by Mrs. Page and Page, respectively.
But, after Falstaff has been sufficiently humiliated, Slender enters in
discomfiture and announces that he has run away with a boy.
Caius comes in to report indignantly that he has wed a boy whom,

418

PLAUTINE SOURCE OF "MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR" 75

according to Mrs. Page's directions, he had stolen away as Anne.
Then Fenton and Anne enter and beg the forgiveness of the Pages.
They have eloped and have been married.

Here then occurs in both plays the marriage of a man to another
male who is disguised as a woman with whom he is in love. In
Casina only one such marriage occurs, whereas there are two in The
Merry Wives, but, in the former, Lysidamus is as much deceived by
the false Casina as is Olympic. There is no mistreatment in Shake-
speare's play of the gulled suitors, as in Casina, but that has evidently
been allotted to Falstaff, whose "villainy" is punished by the fairies
with their pinchings. Only a trace remains in Slender's boast
(11. 195-97): "Had it not been i' the church, I would have swing'd
him, or he should have swing'd me."

The entrance of Fenton and Anne as married is based upon the
statement of the Plautine epilogue that, being found a free woman
and the daughter of Alcesimus, Casina will be married to
Euthynicus. We see, therefore, in both plays, that the true lovers
in whose way parental disapproval has stood (and in Plautus an
insurmountable social barrier) are at last united with the blessing
of the same parents who had before opposed the match.

Thus we see that fourteen, if not fifteen, of the twenty-two
scenes of The Merry Wives present in sometimes several places and
ways more or less striking resemblances to sixteen of the twenty-three
scenes of Casina. The Shakespearian scenes which appear based
upon the Latin play are : I, i;1 I, iii; I, iv; II, i; H, iii; III, i; III,
ii; III, iii; III, iv; III, v; IV, v; V, i; V, ii; V, iii; V, v.

VIII

Finally, perhaps should be considered briefly the question of
SJhakespeare's knowledge of Latin; for there is no evidence of an
Elizabeth translation of Casina. However, this matter need not
delay one long. Arguments pro and con have been made for over
two centuries, yet no definite conclusion has been generally reached.
To the writer it seems probable that Shakespeare read Latin with
fair proficiency. This appears evident to him from the fact alone

1 See p. 411, n. 2, above.

419

76 R. S. FORSYTHE

that the dramatist drew upon Plautus' Menaechmi, Amphritruo,
Mostellaria, and Miles Gloriosus. Sir Sidney Lee in his Life1 says:
"Aubrey's report that 'he knew Latin pretty well' is incontestable.
The original speech of Ovid and Seneca lay well within his grasp."
Later Sir Sidney says of Shakespeare and Plautus:2 "He had read
the old dramatist at school." Evidence in support of Shakespeare's
Latinity has also been given by Professor J. Churton Collins3 and
others.

But it should moreover be remembered that possibly Shake-
speare had access to manuscript translations of Plautine plays (as
some critics say that he utilized for the Comedy of Errors an un-
printed form of W. W.'s English version of Menaechmi) or an obliging
friend read certain of the comedies to him in English, or perhaps
only outlined them to him. In truth, the important fact is that
Shakespeare knew the plays of Plautus in some form or other.
Whether this form was in the Latin or not is of secondary
importance.4

From the foregoing discussion the writer feels justified in con-
cluding that one of the sources of The Merry Wives of Windsor is
the Casino, of Plautus. This conclusion he bases chiefly upon the
resemblances of the two plays in plot and characters, although there
are few places where verbal borrowing or translation seems dis-
cernible. It is true that there are many deviations from the story
of Casina; the impartial and judicial reader must recognize, how-
ever, that those which are made from the plot of The Two Lovers of
Pisa and from that of Philenio are as great. Furthermore, a com-
parison of any Shakespearian play with its source will reveal a similar
alteration of the original. Here, too, in The Merry Wives is a situa-
tion which lent itself peculiarly to free adaptation : the problem of
combining three different stories — one, that of a play, the two

1 P. 22. 2 p. 109.

8 "Shakespeare as a Classical Scholar" in Studies in Shakespeare, pp. 1-95.

* Professor Irving Babbitt says in his Literature and the American College, p. 204,
note: "The atmosphere in which Shakespeare wrote was so saturated with Greek and
Latin influence as to make his direct acquaintance with the classics a secondary question."

420

PLAUTINE SOUKCE OF "MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR" 77

others from novels — into a unified drama. With the same freedom
displayed in his combination and adaptation of The Taming of a
Shrew and Supposes as The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare altered
the plots from Tarleton's News, from The Palace of Pleasure, and from
Plautus, and wove them into a well-knit play — The Merry Wives of
Windsor.

R. S. FORSYTHE
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

NOTE. — Until the foregoing article was in type in April, 1920, the writer
had not seen Miss Cornelia C. Coulter's paper, "The Plautine Tradition in
Shakespeare," published in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology,
for January, 1920 (Vol. XIX, pp. 66-83). "A Plautine Source of The
Merry Wives of Windsor" was completed and submitted to Modern Philology
in August, 1919. The present writer's conclusions are, therefore, inde-
pendent of those of Miss Coulter. They differ, too, considerably from hers,
for he finds much more than a "faint" reminiscence of Casina in The Merry
Wives ("The Plautine Tradition," p. 75), and he does not derive Falstaff
from the Plautine miles gloriosus (pp. 80, 83). R. S. F.

421

THE ABBE LE BLANC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE

In the seventeenth century, says Joseph Texte of the French,
"nous e*tions dans Fheureuse persuasion que tout ce qui n'etait
pas frangais mangeait du foin et marchait a quatre pattes."1 The
eighteenth century changed that. The current, which in the first
quarter of the century had been setting more and more toward
England, began in the second quarter to gather more strength for
its onward sweep. Not only the Augustans, Addison, Pope, and
Swift, were beginning to be known, but even the " barbarian"
Shakespeare was awakening curiosity and calling forth a strange
mingling of timid admiration and violent abuse. Boyer's early
notice of the poet in 1700,2 the "Shakees Pear" of the Journal des
savants* the "Chacsper" of the 1715 translation of Collier's Short
View* the "Dissertation sur la poesie angloise" in the Journal
litteraire de la Haye5 — all these had prepared the way and then had
sunk into comparative oblivion at the appearance of men of greater
talents whose interests also turned in the same direction.

The Swiss Protestant, Be"at-Louis de Muralt, had been in Eng-
land as long ago as 1694 and had made good use of his time, but his
famous Lettres sur les Anglois et sur les Frangois, which Voltaire did
not disdain and which Rousseau used and esteemed,6 were slow in
appearing. Not until 1725 were they published but, as early as
1727, a second edition became necessary.7 Muralt apologized for
treating such a bagatelle as literature and relegated it to a place
of secondary importance. Moreover, he preferred Ben Jonson to
"Schakspear."8

1 Joseph Texte, J '. J. Rousseau et les origines du cosmopolitisme litteraire (Paris,
1895), p. 16.

2 J. J. Jusserand, Shakespeare en France sous Vancien regime (Paris, 1898), pp. 141-42.

* Ibid., p. 147. * Ibid., p. 140. B Ibid., pp. 148-49.

• Cf. my article, "The Sources of Rousseau's Edouard Bomston," Modern Philology,
XVII, 134-37.

1 Muralt, Lettres sur les Anglois, 2d ed., Cologne, 1727. Cf., for notice of other
rapidly succeeding editions and reprints, Otto von Greyerz, Introd. to Muralt's Lettres
(Bern, 1897), pp. xviii-xix.

a Muralt, Lettres, Cologne, 1727, p. 34.
423] 79 [MODEEN PHILOLOGY, December, 1920

80 GEOEGE R. HAVENS

The attitude of Voltaire as expressed in the Lettres philosophiques
of 1734 is perhaps too widely stressed. It should be balanced by the
more favorable view presented by two works which antedate the
Philosophical Letters, namely, the Discours sur la tragedie prefixed
to Brutus and published in 1731, and the French version of the Essai
sur la poesie epique of 1733. In the Preface to Brutus for instance, we
find Voltaire exclaiming:

Au milieu de tant de fautes grossi£res, avec quel ravissement je voyais
Brutus, tenant encore un poignard teint du sang de Ce"sar, assembler le
peuple remain, et lui parler ainsi du haut de la tribune aux harangues !

In closing, Voltaire writes:

Peut-6tre les Frangais ne souffriraient pas que Ton fit paraitre sur leurs
theatres un choeur compose* d'artisans et de ple'b&ens romains; que le corps
sanglant de Ce"sar y fut expose" aux yeux du peuple, et qu'on excitat ce peuple
a la vengeance du haut de la tribune aux harangues; c'est a la coutume, qui
est la reine de ce monde, a changer le gout des nations, et a tourner en plaisir
les objets de notre aversion.1

Here, even taking into account the fact that Voltaire is preparing
the public for his own innovations, we have what is really a quite
fair and broad-minded attitude. He is sincere in his admiration.
His desire to imitate English drama proves that. In the Discours
sur la tragedie likewise, after admitting that Shakespeare is in part
"monstrueux" and "absurde," Voltaire says he must admit that
the English are right in admiring him.

II est impossible que toute une nation se trompe en fait de sentiment,
et ait tort d'avoir du plaisir. Us voyaient comme moi les fautes grossieres
de leur auteur favori; mais ils sentaient mieux que moi ses beaute*s, d'autant
plus singulieres que ce sont des Eclairs qui ont brille" dans la nuit la plus
profonde.

Then follow these words, which are the high-water mark of Voltaire's
appreciation of Shakespeare:

Tel est le privilege du ge*nie d'invention : il se fait une route oft personne
n'a marche* avant lui; il court sans guide, sans art, sans regie; il s'e"gare dans
sa carriere, mais il laisse loin derriere lui tout ce qui n'est que raison et
qu'exactitude.2
The passage speaks for itself and needs no further comment.

1 (Euvres de Voltaire, II (Paris, 1883), 316-18.

2 Ibid., VIII, 317-18.

424

THE ABB£ LE BLANC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE

In 1738 Louis Riccoboni, the famous Lelio of the Comedie
Italienne, who had been in England about ten years before at the
same time as Voltaire, published his Reflexions historiques et critiques
sur les differens theatres de VEurope, in which, while hesitant and
timid, the author nevertheless risks the bold observation that "les
beaute*s des tragedies angloises sont au-dessus de toutes les beaute*s
que les theatres de FEurope peuvent nous montrer."1

The Abbe Prevost too, indefatigable novelist that he was, found
time and inclination to spread the vogue of English literature. His
first appreciations appeared in Volume V of the Memoires d'un homme
de qualite in 1731, the year of Voltaire's Preface to Brutus. This
success was followed within a few years by other novels, Cleveland,
whose hero is an Englishman, the Doyen de Killerine, whose chief
character is an Irish priest, and the Memoires de M. de Montcal, the
scene of which is laid in England and Ireland. At the same time
appeared the twenty volumes of PreVost's periodical publication,
Le Pour et Contre,2 which made a specialty of English literature. In
1742 Prevost took France by storm with his translation of Richard-
son's Pamela. It is necessary to correct the widely held opinion
that Prevost was far in advance of his time and distinguished espe-
cially for his enlightened appreciation of Shakespeare. Fair minded
and moderate he was and he did much to further the cause of English
literature in France, but he must not be thought of as a wildly
enthusiastic champion of Shakespearean drama.3 PreVost has had
his legend, picturesque, alluring, a piquant contrast to Voltaire, but
untrue.

So, with the way thus clearly pointed out, it is not strange that a
young man of thirty, eager for a literary career, should in this day
turn his steps toward England. In fact, the Abbe* Le Blanc bore
with him a commission, so to speak, from no less a person than
La Chausse'e, who wrote him under date of May 1, 1737:

Je ne doute point qu'il n'y ait a profiter sur le Parnasse anglois et je
m'en rapporte bien a vous pour ramasser les fleurs qui sont a votre usage et

1 Riccoboni, Reflexions, etc. (Amsterdam, 1740), pp. 138-39.

2 Published by Didot (Paris, 1733-40).

3 For a more detailed study of this question, cf. my article, " The Abbe" Pr6vost and
Shakespeare," Modern Philology, XVII, 177-98.

425

82 GEORGE R. HAVENS

qui peuvent 6tre transplanters ici. On compte sur vous Fhiver prochain.
... Je vais me mettre a Tanglois et je ferai venir les pieces qu'il faut voir
quand on veut se donner une idee du theatre comique anglois.1

Whatever La Chausse*e may have done with his English,2 Le Blanc
did not fail to make use of his. In 1737 he began to write to friends
of some prominence in France letters on England and the English
and continued to do so until 1744. In 1745, under the title of Lettres
d'un Francois, the collection was published without chronologi-
cal arrangement3 in three of those small russet volumes that the
eighteenth century loved so well.

The Abbe Le Blanc (Jean Bernard) was born in 1707 and died
in 1781. Maupertuis offered him a position at the court of Prussia,
but Le Blanc refused it. Through Mme de Pompadour, he obtained
the sinecure of " historiographe des batiments du roi," which he kept
throughout his life. The author of some verse and of a tragedy,
Aben-Sa/id, which was twelve times played at the Comedie Fran9aise,
the Abb6 Le Blanc chose no ill means of augmenting his fame when
he decided to pass seven years in England. In fact, his Lettres were
read with avidity and brought their author into prominence.

Le Blanc's impression of English character is not essentially
different from that given by his predecessors and already becoming
traditional.4 According to the French writer, the English pride
themselves on being reasonable and on thinking deeply,5 they are
frank,6 distinguished for their good sense,7 impatient of restraint
and tenacious in their purposes,8 eccentric,9 violent and extreme in

1 Revue d' Histoire litteraire de la France (1919), pp. 98-99.

« M. Jusserand (op. cit., p. 192) thinks that La Chaussge was strongly influenced by
English literature. M. Lanson favors the opposite opinion that such influence, if it
existed at all, was slight (Nivelle de La Chaussee et la comedie larmoyante, pp. 130-31).

3 The Lettres d'un Francois were published by Jean Neaulme at The Hague in 1745
with this introductory note by the editor: " Ces Lettres ont 6t6 (icrites d'Angleterre depuis
I'annge 1737 jusques vers la fin de I'annge derniSre 1744. L'auteur qui connoit tout le
mgrite et de celles que M. de Muralt, et de celles que 1'un des plus grands gcrivains de
notre si§cle ont publiees sur les mceurs et le gouvernement des Anglois, ne pensoit point
alors §, rendre les siennes publiques; ainsi il n'en a point retenu les dates sur des copies
qu'il n'avoit gardens que pour son usage particulier: cela est cause qu'on n'a pu les
imprimer suivant le terns ou elles ont Ste" ecrites, et qu'il y en a au III. volume qui
devroient 6tre au I."

< Of. Modern Philology, XVII, 131-37, for the views of Muralt, Prevost, and

5 Le Blanc, Lettres d'un Francois, I, 2, 92; II, 342; III, 297.

• Ibid., I, 197. ' ibid., ii, 181. s Ibid., I, 59.

• Ibid., I, 84-85, 144; III, 294.

426

THE ABB£ LE BLANC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE 83

everything,1 intemperate,2 of brusque and unpleasing manners,3
afflicted with "spleen,"4 of gloomy and harsh exterior,6 filled with
national pride,6 but withal honorable,7 kindly, and possessed of very
lovable, human qualities,8 when once they are known and under-
stood. One should, however, be careful not to form too favorable
and exaggerated an opinion of them. ' .

Ce sont des hommes comme les autres, qui connoissent la raison et ne
la suivent pas toil jours.9

Ne croyez pas cependant les Anglois plus sages que nous; leurs ridicules
sont diffe'rens, mais les hommes sont partout les memes.10

Bien des gens ont peut-etre parmi nous une opinion trop favorable des
Anglois; ils ne connoissent la nation que par ce qu'elle a de plus poli. ... Des
hommes tels que Mylord Boolinbroke, ou Mylord Chesterfield sont rares,
non-seulement dans leurs pays, mais dans leur siecle meme.11

Moreover, Le Blanc admits frankly the danger of attempting to
generalize about a whole nation.

Ces jugemens que Ton porte de toute une nation sont rarement justes
et presque toujours t&neraires. D'ailleurs il n'est peut-Stre point de peuple
dans 1'Europe dont il soit plus difficile de donner une ide*e ge"ne"rale que de
celui parmi lequel je vis aujourd'hui; les Anglois sont aussi differens entre
eux que leur nation est elle-meme diffe*rente des autres.12

Finally, he protects himself, or perhaps defends himself, against
criticism by this fair, tactful, but cautious statement :

Comme il est de Fhomme de se tromper, et de l'honn£te homme de recon-
noitre son erreur, j'avoue de bonne foi que je crains de n'avoir pas connu
tout le nitrite des Anglois, lorsque j'ai ve"cu parmi eux. Je puis avoir 6te*
choqu6 de ce qui n'est que I'opposS de nos de"fauts. Ce qui m'a paru contraire
aux biense*ances, ne Fest peut-etre qu'a nos usages.13

As to the vogue of the English language in France, the following
passage offers interesting testimony :

Nous avons mis depuis peu leur langue au rang des langues sgavantes;
les femmes m£me Fapprennent, et ont renonc6 a 1'italien pour 4tudier celle
de ce peuple philosophe. II n'en est point dans la province d'Armande et
de Belise qui ne veuille sgavoir Panglois.14

1 Ibid., I, 32, 215. * Ibid., I, 15; 11,263; III. 294.

2 Ibid., I, 51. • Ibid., I, 15.
» Ibid., III. 298. » Ibid. I. 21.

« Ibid., I, 237, 251; III, 16. » Ibid.

6 Ibid., I, 47, 173, 323 ; II. €9. " Ibid.

• Ibid., I, 10, 12, 93-94. " Ibid.

^ Ibid., III. 294. " Ibid.

427

III. 64-65.

I. 19.

Ill, 379-80.

II, 334.

84 GEORGE R. HAVENS

English is a harsher language than French, thinks Le Blanc, but
in spite of that fact it is a better poetic medium.1 "Le franc. ois
paroit e'tre la langue de la raison, 1'anglois celle de 1'enthousiasme."2
It is especially adapted to rendering expression to the emotions,
love, friendship, grief, and despair.3 The English rarely seek any-
thing but force of expression; most of them do not even admit "la
distinction des expressions nobles ou basses."4 In time doubtless
their language will acquire more polish and, like French, lose much
of its force while at the same time gaming in beauty.5 It goes
without saying that, in Le Blanc's opinion, the English lack taste.6
Nevertheless, their example can be of use to the French.

Anglois, Italien, Frangois, qu'importe qui nous 6claire, pourvu qu'on
nous conduise au sanctuaire de la ve*rite.7

Les Franc. ois ne sont si remplis de pre"juge"s que parce que ne sortant pas
de chez eux, ils ne connoissent pas tout ce qu'ont d'excellent les nations qui
nous environnent.8

English literature held an important place among the topics
treated by Le Blanc's pen. The Augustans of course attract his
attention. "M. Pope" is, as one would expect, "le Despreaux
d'Angleterre."9 It is the comparison already consecrated by
Le Blanc's predecessors. Pope is the authority "a qui je m'en rap-
porte pour tout ce qui regarde les vers anglois."10 "Les deux Essais
de M. Pope que M. 1'abbe* Du Resnel a mis si heureusement en vers
franc. ois ont reQu les applaudissemens qu'ils me'ritent."11 Pope is
cited several times12 and once is criticized unfavorably,13 but nothing
of special interest is brought forward. Addison is generally treated
with much more respect and is quoted more frequently than Pope.14
He is "1'auteur anglois qui a le mieux peint les mceurs de sa nation,"15
though in another place Le Blanc says that "il a flatte* sa nation

1 Le Blanc, I, 305. « Ibid., I, 323-24.

2 Ibid., I, 306. 5 Ibid., I, 108.
» Ibid., I, 118.

« Ibid., II, 246. Of. I, 317-18; II, 203, 216.

» Ibid., III. 249. 11 Ibid., II. 72.

s Ibid., I, 50. 12 Ibid., II, 56.

• Ibid., I, 159. " Ibid., III. 337.

"> Ibid., I, 162.

"Ibid., I, 109, 113, 166, 174; II, 113, 153, 315; III, 75.

is Ibid., I, 68.

428

THE ABBE LE BLANC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE

dans les portraits qu'il en a faits."1 His Cato is "une des tragedies
qui fait le plus d'honneur au theatre anglois."2 Evidently Le Blanc,
like most of his contemporaries, prefers drama that is classical in
form. As an example of Steele's work, Le Blanc recommends to
his friend, La Chaussee, The Conscious Lovers, "une des meilleures
comedies du theatre anglois,"3 translates Act IV, scene 1, and praises
the attack on duelling. Since, however, Prevost had already trans-
lated the whole play in Le Pour et Contre,4 Le Blanc's originality is
of the slightest. Swift of course — the phrase had been made cur-
rent by Voltaire — is an English Rabelais.5 He is cited a propos of
the supposed bad taste of English poets,6 and it is noted that the
French have welcomed "tout ce qu'on nous a traduit des ouvrages
du docteur Swift,7'7 but Le Blanc, like Prevost8 before him, shudders
at the bitterly satirical proposal for using the children of the poor
people of Ireland as food for the rich.

On sent bien que c'est une satire violente centre le gouvernement d'An-
gleterre qui tient 1'Irelande dans Poppression. Mais on manque quel-
quefois le but faute d'adresse. L'auteur a voulu faire rire et il reVolte. Une
satire qu'on etit pu relire avec plaisir eut surement fait plus d'effet qu'un
e"crit que le dugout fait tomber des mains.9

Shaftesbury, Le Blanc considers "un de leurs plus judicieux
critiques,"10 and his strictures against the English stage as often
"une scene de carnage"11 are cited from the Advice to an Author.
Shaftesbury, like Congreve, Addison, Swift, and Pope, has dis-
tinguished himself above most English authors because of his study
of "nos bons auteurs du dernier siecle" and of "les grands modeles
de 1'antiquite."12 Gay's Beggars' Opera arouses Le Blanc's ire. Its
characters are "brigands et coupe-jarrets," but it has long enter-
tained the London populace and, Le Blanc notes with regret, con-
tinues to do so.13 Richardson's Pamela has held the Abbe*'s interest

1 Ibid., I, 14.

2 Ibid., Ill, 131. Of. Voltaire, (Euvres, II, 322.

» Ibid., II, 122. « Ibid., I, 110-11.

< Le Pour et Contre, VIII, 109-321. » Ibid., II, 72.

6 Le Blanc, I, 115. 8 Le Pour et Contre, I, 298.

» Le Blanc, I, 283, note. A translation follows, pp. 284-301.
« Ibid., I, 119.

" Ibid., Ill, 187, note. Cf. Ill, 167-68, note b.
" Ibid., Ill, 26.

"Ibid., Ill, 209. Cf. Ill, 184, note o and III, 231, note.

429

86 GEORGE R. HAVENS

powerfully "malgre les longueurs et un fonds de mo3urs basses qui
pen vent revolter la plupart des lecteurs."1

So much for the contemporary, or nearly contemporary, period.
Some Restoration writers were also treated by Le Blanc.

Dryden is "un des poetes anglois qui a eu le plus d'esprit."2
He is praised for his translation of Virgil.3 All for Love is spoken of
favorably in one passage and unfavorably in another.

C'est de tous les ouvrages dramatiques de ce po&te, celui ou il a mis le
plus d'art et c'est une des meilleures tragedies du theatre anglois; elle est
traduite dans le Pour et Contre de M. I'abb6 PreVost.4

But a little later the French author writes :

Antoine plonge* dans la mollesse perd I'empire de 1'univers: c'est ce que
M. Dryden appelle le Monde bien Perdu. Racine merite d'etre critiqu6 pour
avoir mis sur la scene des he*ros trop effe'mine's, mais ce n'e"toit pas au po&te
anglois a lui en faire un reproche.6

Evidently the first passage is Le Blanc's real estimate of the play
as a whole, while the latter is but the reaction of his national pride
against Dryden's criticism of Racine. "Otwai" and Southerne,
"deux des plus grands tragiques du theatre anglois,"6 are both
criticized for the mingling of tragic and comic elements.

La Venise preservee d'Otway, une des pieces les plus tragiques du theatre
anglois, est couple d chaque scene par une intrigue du comique le plus bas
et le plus trivial. Oroonoko et le Fatal Manage de Southern ont le meme
de"faut, ou plutdt c'est celui de beaucoup de tragedies angloises, ou il y a
d'ailleurs de grandes beaute"s.7

Le Blanc translates for Bouhier Act III, scene 2, of Rowe's Tamerlane
and comments: Cette sc&ne est traite*e avec art et ecrite avec beau-
coup de force."8 Congreve's borrowings from Moliere are noted,9
but he is called "le comique le plus sage et le premier de tous."10
The Way of the World is praised as his masterpiece11 and as best

1 Le Blanc, I. 280. 7 Ibid., Ill, 143-44, note x.

2 Ibid., I, 324. s rbid., II, 198-201.
s Ibid., I, 307. » Ibid., Ill, 129-30.

< Ibid., Ill, 151-52, note m. «> Ibid., Ill, 182, note a.

* Ibid., Ill, 173, note b. " Ibid., Ill, 313-14, note.

« Ibid., Ill, 163, note 6.

430

THE ABBE LE BLANC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE

portraying his age. Nevertheless, Restoration writers in general
receive Le Blanc's condemnation.

Les e*crivains de ce tems-la ... ne furent exacts ni sur la morale, ni sur
le style. D'un cote* ils secouerent le joug de toute biense*ance; de Pautre
ils sacrifi^rent le jugement a Pesprit, c'est-a-dire, au mauvais gout; car
Pesprit affect^ ou deplace" est re"ellement un de'faut."1

Of the poets of the period :

Cowley pe"tille d'esprit, le Comte de Rochester ne respecte pas meme
la pudeur, Waller le sage, Waller est peut-£tre le seul qui se soit preserve* de
Pune et Pautre contagion.2

Vous me demandez quel e*toit ce Waller dont S. Evremond parle avec tant
d'eloge. C'est un des auteurs a qui la poe*sie angloise a le plus d'obligation.
C'est le premier de ceux de cette nation qui ait consulte* Pharmonie dans
Parrangement des mots [yet Shakespeare had already written!] et suivi le
gout dans le choix des ide"es. II a autant de galanterie et plus de naturel
que Voiture, autant de feu et plus de correction que Chaulieu. C'est de Pavis
de ceux qui s'y connoissent, le poete le plus aimable et le plus chatie* que
les Anglois ayent eu.3

As an example of Waller's work, Le Blanc gives an adaptation of
the fable of Apollo and Daphne written for the Countess of Sunder-
land.4 Pryor is barely mentioned,5 but Milton rightly receives
more consideration than others of his period.

Avec un peu plus de sagesse et de gout, Milton eut fait un chef-d'oeuvre
de son Paradis perdu.6

On doit combler cPeloges Pheureux enthousiasme qui a produit un poeme
tel que le Paradis perdu; mais peut-on ne pas condamner en me^me terns celui
d'un lecteur qui se passionnera pour cet ouvrage au point de n'en pas voir
les de"fauts.7

Le Blanc observes that it was Addison who raised Milton's work
from the neglect into which it had fallen in consequence of his
attachment to Cromwell's cause.8 The following passage is sig-
nificant from the point of view of awakening interest in nature. It
stresses the subjective attitude and points toward romanticism.

Milton peint non-seulement la fraicheur du matin et la beaute* de Pe"mail
d'une prairie, ou du verd d'une colline, il exprime jusqu'aux sentimens de
joye et de plaisir que ces objets excitent dans notre ame.9

1 Ibid., I, 106.

2 Ibid., I, 106-7.
» Ibid., II, 82.

* Ibid., II, 83-84.
* Ibid.. I. 11.
« Ibid., I, 318.
431

J Ibid., III. 250.
« Ibid., Ill, 109.
• Ibid., II. 207.

88 GEORGE R. HAVENS

J'aimerois assez vous entretenir de la poe*sie des anglois; mais Milton
dont un de vos confreres nous a donne* une si belle traduction, vous en fait
mieux connoitre le genie que tout ce que je pourrois vous en dire.1

Finally, Milton receives this high praise :

L'Angleterre a eu plusieurs poetes celebres. II en est peu dans aucune
nation qu'on puisse comparer a Milton.2

Concerning all the authors so far treated, Le Blanc says much
that is judicious and fair, but he discusses none of them in much
detail and throughout we feel that the Frenchman has expressed
no new and stimulating ideas for the consideration of his country-
men. He cannot in this respect measure up to what had already
been done by Muralt, Voltaire, and even Pre*vost.

One distinction, however, he has, and, either for a Frenchman
or for an Englishman of the period, it is no slight one. He has read
Chaucer.

L'anglois d'il y a trois ou quatre cens ans e*toit encore plus melange* du
franc. ois qu'il ne Test aujourd'hui. Je ne syai meme si la connoissance de
Tanglois de ces tems-la ne seroit pas tres utile a ceux qui veulent entendre
notre vieux frangois. La lecture de Chaucer m'a rendu celle de nos anciens
poetes plus facile.3

How much knowledge of Chaucer, Le Blanc may have acquired is
problematical, but at any rate it is most interesting to learn that he
got even so far as to read him at all.

As we come now to the Elizabethan age, it is of interest to note
the pre-eminence Le Blanc accords to it, especially in view of the
comparative barrenness of his treatment of other English authors.

C'est sous le regne d'Elizabeth qu'elle [la langue anglaise] en a e*te* le
plus pres [de la perfection]. Cette langue fut alors enrichie par la traduction
de la Bible, de beaucoup de mots et de tours orientaux. Sir Walter Raleigh,
un des ministres de cette grande reine, qui elle-meme posse*doit plusieurs
langues, le celebre Spencer et Fairfax, sont encore compte's au rang des
meilleurs e*crivains de leur nation.4

It is significant that Le Blanc, through Swift, has been led to notice
the great part played by the King James Bible in the formation of
English style. Voltaire, however, had already called attention to
the same fact.

1 Le Blanc, I, 155. » Ibid., I, 104-5.

2 JBid., I, 204. * Ibid., I, 105-6.

432

THE ABBE LE BLANC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE 89

It remains to treat the most important and interesting part of
Le Blanc's literary criticism, that which deals with Shakespeare.

Shakespeare, says Le Blanc, is "le plus original" of all authors
ancient or modern, and far superior to his rival, Ben Jonson, who,
in Dryden's phrase, is merely "un sgavant plagiaire des anciens."
"II a Fimagination aussi riche que forte; il peint tout ce qu'il voit,
et il embellit tout ce qu'il peint." An example of this is the descrip-
tion of Cleopatra's appearance before Antony. But, alas! though
Shakespeare rises to the sublime, he sinks also to the lowest depths.
"Ceux de nos Frangois qui en ont parle", 1'ont loue et ne 1'ont pas
juge."1 A scene from the first part of Henry VI is praised as worthy
of the " grand Corneille," and likewise a selection from the second
part of Henry VI, a translation of which is given, but the comic
scenes are severely censured.2 Shakespeare is the enemy of all
constraint. He wrote his plays, now in prose, now in verse, now with
rhyme, now without. His plays contain great beauties, but great
faults also.3 His successors have copied his faults, but have lacked
his genius.4 Nevertheless, he is the poet "qui a le mieux peint et
la nature, et les effets des passions et les de*fauts attaches a 1'humanite*
en general et ceux qui sont particuliers a sa nation."5 He is the fore-
most dramatic author of England, a truly great poet, but no trans-
lations in French would do other than harm to his reputation.6 In
his finest passages he is not inferior to any other author ancient or
modern, but unfortunately directly after his best scenes we must
expect to find one of the most ridiculous examples of low comedy.
The English excuse this, but the French will not be so indulgent.
The admiration of the English for Shakespeare is excessive. We, the

1 Yet already, Voltaire had spoken, Prevost too, and Riccoboni, and none of these
had failed to point out "faults." D'Argens in 1738 had written of the " 6tat [de barbarie]
du theatre anglois." " Je n'ai jamais vu tant de ge"nie et si peu de bons ouvrages," and
Shakespeare is included in this condemnation (Lettres juives, IV, 237).

2 Le Blanc, III, 49-63.

3 Cf . Charles Gildon, Remarks on the Plays of Shakespeare (Rowe's ed. of Shakespeare,
1709-10), VII, 425.

« Le Blanc, I, 309-10. Cf. Voltaire, CEuvres. II, 318.

s Ibid., I, 182.

« In spite of the great degree of truth contained in this remark as far as translations
in French are concerned, it is of some piquancy in view of the fact that La Place's trans-
lation appeared in 1745, the same year as Le Blanc's Lettres, which thus condemned
translations of Shakespeare as of little use after all.

433

90 GIOKGE R. HAVENS

French, would object to seeing the power and sublimity of
Corneille mingled with low and trivial comedy, puns, and plays
upon words.

Le Blanc translates the speeches of Brutus and of Antony after
the death of Caesar, and then comments:

Cette scene, ou sont ces deux chefs-d'oeuvre, finit par le comique le plus
bas et le plus ridicule. Antoine n'a pas plutot inspire" au peuple 1'ardeur
de venger la mort de Cesar, qu'on voit paroitre un nouveau personnage.
Le peuple 1'entoure avec empressement, lui demande quel est son nom, d'ou
il vient et ou il va, s'il est garcon ou marie, etc. II repond qu'il s'appelle
Cinna, et aussitot le peuple s'e"crie: "C'est un des conspirateurs, mettons-le
en pieces: non, messieurs, dit le pauvre miserable, tout effraye", je suis Cinna
le poete. — N'importe, reprend la populace, de"chirons-le pour ses mauvais
vers. — Voila comme finit d'ordinaire tout le tragique de Shakespeare, voila
comme toutes ses pieces sont bigarre"es de scenes pathe"tiques et de scenes
boufonnes."1

As for the conference between Brutus, Cassius, Octavius, and
Antony, "a, la grossierete des injures qu'ils se disent les uns aux
autres dans cette entrevue, on ne peut pas les prendre pour des
Remains." Prevost's attitude toward a similar criticism is more
enlightened.2 Shakespeare is not afraid, notes Le Blanc, to bring
Caesar on the stage "en bonnet de nuit" (probably nightgown).
"Vous sentez par la combien il doit le degrader." As to Falstaff,
he is but a crude buffoon.

A 1'egard du style, c'est la partie qui distingue le plus Shakespeare des
autres poetes de sa nation, c'est celui ou il excelle. II peint tout ce qu'il
exprime. II anime tout ce qu'il dit. II parle pour ainsi dire une langue qui
lui est propre, et c'est ce qui le rend si difficile a traduire. II faut pourtant
avouer aussi, que si quelquefois ses expressions sont sublimes, souvent il
donne dans le gigantesque. Ainsi, dans cette piece de Jules-Cesar, Portia,
femme de Brutus, se plaint a lui de ce qu'il a des secrets pour elle, et lui
demande si elle ne demeure plus que dans les faubourgs de son bon plaisirf
Croiroit-on que cette phrase ridicule put etre de 1'auteur de la harangue que
vous venez de lire ? D'un autre cote, je ne puis passer sous silence un trait de
cette trage"die, qui marque, ce me semble, autant de finesse d'esprit que le

1 Evidently Le Blanc catches no glimpse of the value of such a scene in portraying
the fickle violence of a mob.

2 Pour et Contre, V, 40-41. Of the quarrel between Octavia and Cleopatra, Prgvost
observes: " Si 1'une etoit Romaine et 1'autre Reine d'Egypte, elles ne laissoient pas toutes
deux d'etre femmes." Le Blanc, unlike PreVost, thought that a Roman was a super-
human being.

434

THE ABBE LE BLANC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE 91

discours de Brutus suppose d'eleVation. De"cius dit, en parlant de Ce"sar:
"II se plait a entendre dire, qu'on surprend des lions avec des filets et les
hommes avec des flatteries, etc., mais quand je lui dis qu'il hait les flatteurs,
il m'approuve et ne s'aper^oit pas que c'est en cela que je le flatte le plus."

However, when all is said, Shakespeare will never be known by those
who do not read English. He cannot be translated and still remain
Shakespeare.1

Le Blanc, even though he found certain details to criticize,
deserves special mention for noting Shakespeare's pre-eminence in
the matter of style. M. Jusserand has already called attention to
the fact.2 It is worth noting too that Texte, while he considered the
influence of Shakespeare to have been slight in France so far as the
development of historical drama and the breaking up of classical
tragedy are concerned, attributed great influence to Shakespeare's
style.3 This renders the Abbess observations the more significant.

Le Blanc thinks the English need the bit more than they need
the spur. They regard all rules as arbitrary, unwilling to recognize
that these rules are but copied

d'apres la nature et qu'elles ne sont autre chose que les moyens les plus sures
pour y arriver. Leur fameux Shakespeare est un exemple frappant du
danger que Ton court a s'en ^carter. Ce poete, un des plus grands ge"nies
qui ayent peut-etre jamais existe, pour avoir ignore* les regies des anciens ou
pour n'avoir pas voulu les suivre, n'a pas produit un seul ouvrage qui ne
soit un monstre dans son espece; s'il y a dans tous des endroits admirables,
il n'y en a pas un dont on puisse soutenir la lecture d'un bout a 1'autre,4

all of which is extreme enough to satisfy the most rabid adversary
of Shakespeare.

To Crebillon, Le Blanc writes as follows :

Dans vos ouvrages la terreur nait plus de la force des sentimens et de
Pe"nergie des expressions que de 1'horreur du spectacle. ... II n'en est pas
ainsi de Shakespeare; quoique personne n'ait donn6 plus de force que lui
a ses expressions, la terreur qu'il inspire est due principalement aux spec-
tacles affreux qu'il expose sous les yeux. Dans sa trage"die du Maure de
Venise on voit Othello etouffer sa femme dans son lit.5

1 Le Blanc, II, 73-81.

2 J. J. Jusserand, op. cit., p. 177.

s Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la litter ature franc aise, VII, 721-22.

« Le Blanc, I, 313-14.

5 Thomas Rymer in 1693 had summarized his views on Othello as follows: "What-
ever rubs or difficulty may stick on the Bark, the moral, sure, of this Fable is very instruct-
ive. First, This may be a caution to all Maidens of Quality how, without their Parents'

435

92 GEORGE R. HAVENS

Le Blanc then gives the plot of Titus Andronicus, and concludes:

Je finis, monsieur; car je m'imagine que vous n'etes pas moins las que
moi de tant d'horreurs. Quelque me"chans que soient les hommes, je doute
qu'il y en ait d'aussi abominables que le Maure sanguinaire et la cruelle
Tamora. Corneille a fait, dit-on, les hommes plus vertueux et plus grands
qu'ils ne sont. On a reproche" a Euripide de les avoir fait trop me"chans;
mais Shakespeare les a faits plus scele"rats peut-etre que la nature humaine
ne la comporte.1 ... Sans les details de quelques morceaux pathetiques,
on la prendroit plutot pour le delire d'une imagination de'regle'e que pour
1'ouvrage d'un grand poete.2

Le Blanc's attitude toward Othello is entirely conventional for a
Frenchman of the time. Especially interesting is the attempt of
Le Blanc to shock the great " shocker," Crebillon. We are likely
now to forget that Shakespeare ever had any part in the writing of
so sanguinary a play as Titus Andronicus, but it is not at all strange
that Le Blanc should have come upon it and been repelled. He
does, however, frankly admit that it is an extreme example, that
it is no longer played, and that some in fact do not consider it
Shakespeare's work at all.

In another passage addressed to Crebillon, we find Le Blanc
interested in the sources of Hamlet, Cymbeline, Romeo and Juliet,
and Othello. He summarizes the plot of Hamlet, and refers inci-
dentally to the "belle edition des CEuvres de Shakespeare" by Pope.
Then follows this interesting comment on the ghosts of Shakespeare's
plays :

Les spectateurs ont assez de peine a se de"fendre de la terreur que les
scenes de cette espece inspirent dans Shakespeare. II donne a ses expres-
sions une force qui e*tonne toujours.3 II anime les phantomes qu'il fait
paroitre. ... Les objets du monde les plus ridicules, trois sorcieres et leur
chaudron jouent un tres grand role dans sa trage*die de Macbeth*

consent, they run away with Blackamoors. Secondly, This may be a warning to all good
Wives that they look well to their Lumen. Thirdly, This may be a lesson to Husbands
that before their Jealousie be Tragical, the proofs may be mathematical" ("Short View
of Tragedy," in Spingarn, Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, II, 221).

i Le Blanc, III, 87-98.

* Ibid., Ill, 96.

8 Cf . supra, p. 91 , the passage on Shakespeare's style.

« Cf. Voltaire, (Euvres, II, 320. Cf. D'Argens in the Lettres juives (1738). " J'ai vu
dans une des plus belles pieces angloises trois sorciSres descendre du haut du theatre a
calif ourchon sur un manche-a-balai, et venir faire bouillir des herbes dans un chaudron"
(IV, 236).

436

THE ABBE LE BLANC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE 93

He then translates parts of the scenes between the ghost and Hamlet
and comments:

C'est dans les scenes de cette espece que Shakespeare prouve bien qu'il
e"toit grand poete; plus elles sont centre la nature, plus il y employe d'art
et de force pour s'y soutenir. ... La plus grande beaute* de cet acte (3e) et
peut-etre de toute la trage"die, est ce monologue si celebre, ou il examine si
un homme malheureux doit se tuer ou non. M. de Voltaire en a donne une
traduction en vers ou il a rendu toute la force de Poriginal, ainsi vous trou-
verez bon que je vous y renvoye.1 II y a aussi des beaute"s dans la scene
ou le roi se sent presse1 de ses remords.

This scene the Abbe translates, as also the one in which Hamlet
refuses to kill the king at prayers. A criticism of the Abb6 Prevost
follows, but this is based upon a passage which is not really PreVost's
own, having been translated by him from the English of Rowe.2 Le
Blanc continues:

Ophelie, fille de ce seigneur [Polonius], devient folle en apprenant
sa mort. Elle est aime'e d'Hamlet, mais si peu et d'une facon si singuliere
que ce n'est pas la peine d'en parler.3 La malheureuse Ophelie a qui la
tete a tourne^ vient en diffe"rentes scenes pour faire, dire, et chanter mille
extravagances.

Having thus disposed of Ophelia to his satisfaction, the Abbe* turns
to the gravediggers and observes:

Cette scene si vantee par les Anglois entre Hamlet et Pun des fossoyeurs
commence par de mise'rables plaisanteries de la part du fossoyeur et finit
du cote d'Hamlet par des lieux communs de morale sur la vanite" des hommes
et sur Fe'galite' que la mort re"tablit entr'eux; le tout a Poccasion d'une tete
de mort que le fossoyeur dit etre celle d'un nomine" Yorick, un fou du roi,
qu'Hamlet dans son enfance a beaucoup connu. Shakespeare e"toit un
grand genie; mais ce n'est pas dans cette scene que j'en chercherois des
preuves.4

1 Le Blanc, II, 292. Contrast the Bibliotheque britannique (II, 124), which, after
translating the Hamlet monologue "aussi litteralement que nous le pourrons sans 6tre
absolument barbares ou inintelligibles," remarks: " Voila a peu prSs ce que dit Shake-
speare: voici ce que M. de Voltaire lui fait dire" (October-December, 1733). After what
Le Blanc had previously said about inadequate translations, he seems here to be overawed
by Voltaire.

2 Of. my article, "The Abbe" PreVost and Shakespeare," in Modern Philology, XVII,
198, note.

» Contrast Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, London, 1908, pp. 68-69.

4 This is a stock criticism of the gravedigger scene. Cf. Voltaire, Lettres phil.
(Lansotfed.), II, 80; Riccoboni, op. cit., p. 128; D'Argens, op. cit., IV, 237; Prevost,
Pour et Centre, XIV, 66-68.

437

94 GEORGE R. HAVENS

Le Blanc speaks of Hamlet as moralizing "avec tant d'emphase,"
translates the speech of the dying Laertes, notes that the stage is
left "jonche de corps morts," that the duration of the action is such
as to be scarcely exactly known to the author himself, and that
"ce poete a fait peu d'ouvrages dont il n'y ait les trois quarts a
retrancher." Shakespeare wrote in a barbarous age, it is true, before
the French themselves had developed any tragedy at all, but since
his time the English have made little progress.

Si les pieces de leurs auteurs modernes sont plus regulieres, elles n'ont
pas a beaucoup pres les memes beaute*s que celles de Shakespeare.1 II a
sgu peindre toutes les passions excepte* celles de 1'amour.2 S'il revolte par
les petitesses qui lui sont familieres, il e"tonne encore davantage par la
sublimity de son ge"nie. Avec tous ses defauts, c'est le plus grand poete
que les Anglois ayent eu dans la tragedie. Mais est-il bien vrai qu'en cette
partie nous devions aujourd'hui meme les regarder comme nos maitres?
Est-il bien vrai qu'en quelque genre que ce soit nous ne puissions les e"galer ?3

Thus national pride brings the passage to a close.

References to Henry VIII and to King John occur4 and there
are a few other scattered observations of slighter interest.8 Volume
III contains also a translation of a work known as the Supplement
du genie, ou Vart de composer des poemes dramatiques tels que I'ont
pratique plusieurs auteurs celebres du theatre anglois, written by an
author "qui est ici en reputation pour le theatre et que la discretion
ne me permet pas de nommer."6 The notes seem to be by Le Blanc
himself. The text is a satire on English drama, the old sad story
of indifference to the unities, the mingling of tragic and comic
elements, etc.

In conclusion, what may we say of Le Blanc's treatment of
English literature ? Pope we find to be treated favorably, but what
little is said is without special interest. Addison's Goto is praised, a
fact which shows that Le Blanc is inclined to look favorably upon

, Le Blanc does not really prefer plays like Addison's Cato. Cf. supra.

2 By which strange exception must be meant drawing-room love d la Marivaux or
perhaps d la Crtbillon fils.

3 Le Blanc, II, 286-302.
« Ibid., Ill, 168, notes.

* Ibid., Ill, 142, note q; 161, note d; 163, note a; 181, note a; 189, note b.
6 Ibid., Ill, 135-95.

438

THE ABBE LE BLANC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE

drama which is classical in form. Steele's Conscious Lovers is men-
tioned very favorably, but this praise comes lagging along after
Provost's. Swift is praised, but his satirical genius is neither under-
stood nor appreciated. Shaftesbury is esteemed highly as a critic
in sympathy with the French spirit. Gay's Beggars' Opera is severely
censured. Le Blanc considers Richardson's Pamela interesting, but
long drawn out, a verdict which is probably acceptable to most
moderns. Dry den's All for Love is praised. Otway and Southerne
are called great but are criticized for the mingling of tragic and comic,
and Congreve is praised. In general, however, the Restoration
period is condemned as to both style and morality. Waller is
excepted from this condemnation, and Milton's Paradise Lost is
praised highly, though considered somewhat lacking in "sagesse"
and "gout." Raleigh, Spencer, and Fairfax are mentioned, and
attention is called to the influence of the Bible upon English style.
Chaucer has been read with interest. In short, all this is very frag-
mentary criticism, which could have had little influence, but it is
interesting as an indication of the sort of impressions a Frenchman
like Le Blanc brought back with him from England. Shakespeare
is deserving of a more detailed summary.

In his treatment of Shakespeare, Le Blanc has obviously tried
to be fair, but his regard for the "biense"ances" is too great for him
to be able to accept the mingling of tragic and comic elements or to
appreciate their significance as a more complete and less artificial
portrayal of life. It is that inability in one form or another which
constantly prevents him from showing a more complete understanding
or admiration of Shakespeare. Henry VI has interested him. It
is worth noting that he has not overlooked Shakespeare's historical
drama, since only two years later (1747) Renault brought out his
Francois II, which was admittedly inspired by Shakespeare's history
plays.1 Of course it is not certain that there is connection between
Renault and Le Blanc, especially since La Place's translations of
Shakespeare intervene (1745). However, Le Blanc is at least point-
ing the way in a new direction, which unfortunately was not soon
followed by men of sufficient genius to establish historical drama on
the French stage. Othello, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet call

i H. Lion, Le President Hinault (1903), pp. 236 fl.

439

96 GEORGE R. HAVENS

forth interesting comments on the part of the Abbe, but on the whole
it is more criticism of " faults" than of " beauties." For this, how-
ever, there was no lack of precedent in England itself, and this should
not be forgotten in estimating French criticism of the period. Not
to make further mention of Rymer, Charles Gildon (1665-1724)
had remarked that "Shakespeare is indeed stor'd with a great many
beauties, but they are in a heap of rubbish."1 Rowe (1674-1718),
however, had expressed the wish that Rymer had not limited his
attention to the faults, but had " observed some of the beauties too,
as I think it became an exact and equal critique to do. It seems
strange that he should allow nothing good in the whole."2 Le Blanc's
judgments, as those of a man only moderately gifted, represent better
than would those of a man of genius the attitude of the average
cultivated public of the time, interested in foreign literature to an
increasing extent, willing to treat Shakespeare, while criticizing him,
with much the same courtesy they would have used in society, but
not extremely enthusiastic as yet and not able to accept the mingling
of tragic and comic elements in tragedy. It is noteworthy that
Le Blanc, like his predecessors, seems uninterested in Shakespearean
comedy. It is not probable that Le Blanc's Lettres had great influ-
ence. They were too readily absorbed by the great current of inter-
est that was being directed toward England by men of greater abilities
than he. However, they do help to furnish a sort of barometer of the
attitude of the cultivated French public at the time when the first
translation of Shakespeare's works appeared.3 It is of interest too that
many of his letters were addressed to Buffon, La Chaussee, Duclos,
Bouhier, Freret, Crebillon pere, CrSbillon fils, Du Bos, and Montes-
quieu, as well as to others of lesser prominence.4 To have brought
English literature increasingly to the attention of these men is to
have rendered valuable service.

1 Charles Gildon, op. cit., p. 425.

2 Rowe, Introduction to Shakespeare's Works, I (1709), xxxiv-xxxv.
» La Place's partial translation in 1745.

4 Ninety-two letters in all, addressed as follows: Buffon, 19; La ChaussSe, 7;
M. H .... 6; M. le Marquis du T ..., 5; M. 1'abbe d'Olivet, 5; M. Du Clos, 5; M. le
Chevalier de B ..., 4; M. Freret, 4; M. le President Bouhier, 4; M. le Marquis de G ....

3; M. le Due de Nivernois, 3; M. de Cr6billon, 3; M.L.A.H 3; M. le Marquis de

Lomellini, 3; M. 1'Abbe Du Bos, 2; M. de Crebillon fils, 2; M. le Due de C .... 2; M.
l'Abb6 Sallier, 2; M. le Comte de C .... 2; M. l'Abb6 L. C .... 2; M. le President de
Montesquieu 2; M. l'Abb6 Gedouin, 1; M. de Montcrif, 1; M. 1'Abbe Rothelin, 1;
M. de Maupertuis, 1.

440

THE ABB£ LE BLANC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE

Of the style of Shakespeare, Le Blanc had spoken most worthily.
He had not failed to note its power and its beauty, the force of Shake-
speare's expressions, the vividness and reality of the best scenes, the
manner in which the supernatural element was used to grip the spec-
tator and compel his attention. The Abbe had seen too that much of
this power was lost in translation and could never be felt by a French-
man who did not know English. In his objection to frequent
changes of scene and the lapse of time, as well as to the scenes of
buffoonery, Le Blanc was of his time and of his nation, but it should
not be forgotten that even now Shakespeare is scarcely given on the
stage without omissions and that some plays where there is greatest
violation of the unities are almost impossible of satisfactory pres-
entation before a modern audience. The tendency of modern
drama is certainly in the main toward the unities, sanely interpreted,
rather than away from them. No one but Shakespeare has to so
great a degree been able to be a law unto himself. His success has
rather been in spite of his disregard of the unities than because of it.
Le Blanc's greatest shortcoming is in not fully sensing the great
throbbing human life in Shakespeare's work and seeing that it is
this which justifies the methods exemplified in his greatest plays.

GEORGE R. HAVENS
OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

441

"THE PSALTER OF THE PIG," AN IRISH LEGEND

The following Middle-Irish legend is known to me in five manu-
scripts: (1) Book of Fermoy (RIA, p. 54, col. 2, 1. 18— p. 56, col. 2,
1. 16) with a gap of fifteen lines on page 55. Fifteenth century.
Vellum.1 (2) 28. C. 19 (RIA, p. 318, 1. 6— p. 321). Written at
various times, no part earlier than the late eighteenth century.
Paper. (3) 23. M. 47 (RIA, Part V, pp. 93-95). Nineteenth cen-
tury. Paper. (4) 88. M. 50 (RIA, p. 154, 1. 1— p. 156, 1. 6). About
1750. Paper. (5) 24. B. 27 (RIA, pp. 292, 294, 296, 298) .2 Nine-
teenth century. Paper.

A sixth copy, found in the fifteenth-century vellum Book of
Lismore, has been printed and translated by S. H. O'Grady, Silva
Gadelica (London and Edinburgh, 1892, I, 87-89; II, 94-96).

The paper manuscripts, though agreeing in general with the
version represented by Lismore, contain interesting variants and in
some instances serve to improve O'Grady's transcript. The text
here printed is based on MS 23. C. 19, the most complete of the
paper copies.

The version in the Book of Fermoy differs so markedly from that
of the other manuscripts as to justify printing separately. The
manuscript is badly defaced and in many places is illegible.
Whenever possible I have filled the gaps with readings from the
Book of Lismore.

Caenchomrac, the hero of the Saltair na muice, was abbot of
Louth, and, according to the Four Masters,3 died in the year 898:
Caenchomhrac Insi Endoimh, epscop 7 abb Lughmaidh, aitti Aenacain,
mac Eccertaigh, 7 Dunadhaigh, mac Eccertaigh 6 ttat Ui Chuinn na

i There is a short account of the tale in Todd's description of the manuscript, Pro-
ceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Irish MSS Series, I, No. 1 (1870), p. 21.

» The text is here accompanied by a rough English translation.

3 Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland by the Four Masters, ed., John O'Donovan, I,
Dublin, 1856.
4431 99 [MoDEEN PHILOLOGY, December, 1920

100 TOM PEETE CROSS

mbocht, deg an treas Id fichet Juli, " Caenchomrac of Inis Endaimh,
bishop and abbot of Louth, tutor of Aenacan, son of Ecertach, and
of Dunadhach, son of Ecertach, from whom are descended the Ui
Cuinn na mBocht,1 died the twenty-third day of July." The
Ecertach who figures in our tale as a son of Aedacan, is doubltess a
reminiscence of the personage of the same name referred to in the
annalistic passage, where Ecertach is the father of Aenacan. The
Four Masters record the death of Ecertach at the year 893: Eger-
tach, airchinnech Eccailsi bicce, athair Aenacdin 7 Dunadhaigh, deg,
"E., archdeacon of Ecclais bee, father of A. and D., died." Eogan,
represented in the legend as the brother of Ecertach, is perhaps to
be identified with an Eogan who appears in a genealogy of Conn
na mBocht as the grandfather of Ecertach: Maolfinden, mac Cuinn
[na mBocht], mic Joseph, mic Donnchadha, mic Dunadhaigh, mic
Eicceartaigh, mic Luachain, mic Eoghain, mic Aodhagain, mic Tor-
baigh, mic Gormain, do Uibh Ceallaigh Breagh, "Maolfinden, son of
Conn .... son of Ecertach, son of Luachan, son of Eogan ....
of the O'Kellys of Breagh" (P.M., ad an. 1056). As in the annals,
the Eogan of the legend is represented as the son of Aedacan. His
death is recorded by the Four Masters at the year 845: Eoghan .i.
angcoire, mac Aedhagdin, mic Torbaigh, 6 Cluain mic Nois, decc,
"Eogan, the anchorite, of Clonmacnoise, son of Aedacan, son of
Torbach, died." According to the same authority Aedacan died at
Clonmacnoise in the year 834: Aodhagan mac Torbaigh, abb Lucch-
maidh, decc ina ailethre hi cCluain mic Nois; Eoghan, mac Aedha-
gdin, ro ansidhe hi cCluain mic Nois, conadh uadha ro chinset Meic
Cuinn na m-bocht innte, " Aedacan, son of Torbach, abbot of Louth,
died on his pilgrimage in Clonmacnoise; Eogan, son of Aedacan,
remained in Clonmacnoise and froni him are descended the Mac
Cuinn na mBocht there." The Hy-Many of the legend is the native
district of the O ' Kelly s.2 That Eogan should come to be regarded
as the brother of his grandson is quite in accord with recognized
habits of tradition.

1 The Conn na mBocht here referred to is identified by Zimmer (Zt. f. vergl. Sprach-
forsch., XXVIII [1887], 674) with the grandfather of Maolmuire, the scribe of the Lebor
na h Uidre. According to the Four Masters, Conn died in 1059.

2 John O'Donovan, The Tribes and Customs of Hy-Many, Commonly Called O' Kelly's
Country (Irish Archaeological Society), Dublin, 1843, pp. 2ff.; The Tribes of Ireland,
Dublin, 1852 , p. 37, n. 7.

444

"THE PSALTER OF THE PIG," AN IRISH LEGEND 101

Caenchomrao is referred to in several other early Irish docu-
ments. In the Annals of Ulster (Ed., Wm. M. Hennessy, I, Dublin,
1887), he is called episcopus et princeps Lugmaid and his death is
recorded at the year 902. In the Martyr ology of Gorman (Ed.,
Whitley Stokes [Henry Bradshaw Society], London, 1895, p. 143)
his day is given as July 23, and a gloss adds: epscop, 6 Inish Sndoimh
for Loch Ribh. Cain Comrac Innsi Endaimh is also referred to at
July 23 in the Martyrology of Tallaght (Calendar of Irish Saints, the
Martyrology of Tallaght, ed., Matthew Kelly, Dublin, N.D., p. xxx).1
The Martyrology of Donegal contains the following entry at July 30:
Caenchomrac 6 Inis Endaim for Loch Ribh, acus rob epscop e i gCluain
meic Nois ar dtus, do muintir Dega a chenel, acus ro fdgaib Cluain ar
med a airmidne innte ar ro adairset na comfhoigsi e amail fhdid, co
ndechaid d'iarraid uaignesa for Loch Ribh iaram, " Caenchomrac of
Inis Endaim in Loch Ree, who at first was bishop in Clonmacnoise,
his kinship was of the muinter Degha; 2 and because of the excess of
reverence paid him there — for the neighboring people venerated him
as a prophet — he left Cluain and went to seek solitude in Loch
Ree." (Cf. Silva Gadelica, II, 472, 518.]3

The name Mochta, attached to Caenchomrac in the Lismore
version of the legend, was borne by several saints in early Ireland.
The most famous of these founded the monastery of Louth4 — a
fact which may account for the name being connected with Caen-
chomrac. He is commemorated at August 19, and his death is
recorded by Tigernach (Revue celtique, XVII [1896], 134)? the
Annals of Ulster, and the Four Masters at 534.5 The life of St.
Mochta (Maucteus) is given in the Acta sanctorum (Boll.), XXXVII

1 July 23 is also given as his day in the tract De quibusdam episcopis, compiled by
Duald mac Firbis in 16f§ (Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Irish MSS Series,
I, No. 1. p. 114).

2 Caenchomrac's family, the fti Degha, is mentioned in the Book of Leinster (Facs.,
337, a; Cf. Silva Gadelica, II, 472, 518).

3 The name Caenchomraf is common in the Irish monastic records. See, for example,
F. M., ad an. 787, 927, 934, 941, 945, 952, 961, 986; Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy,
Irish MSS Series, I, No. 1, p. 100.

* Cf . Alphons Bellesheim, Geschichte der katolischen Kirche in Irland (Mainz, 1890),
I, 78.

*Ct. Adamnan's Life of St. Columba, ed., Wm. Reeves, Edinburgh, 1874, p. 248;
Bury, Life of St. Patrick, London, 1905, pp. 309 f.; Martyrology of Gorman, ed. cit., p. 161 ;
Rhys, Celtic Folk-Lore Welsh and Manx, Oxford, II (1901), 545; J. H. Todd, St. Patrick,
Apostle of Ireland, Dublin, 1864, pp. 29 ff.

445

102 DOM PEETE CROSS

(1867), 745, and in the Ada sanctorum Hiberniae ex codice Salma-
ticensi, ed., de Smedt and de Backer, Edinburgh and London, 1888,
pp. 905 ff.1

Loch Ri (Ribh), now Loch Ree, an expansion of the Shannon
between Athlone and Lanesborough, is famous in Irish history and
legend.2 Its islands appear to have been favorite resorts of Irish
monks during the Middle Ages,3 and during the Norse period they
were subject to frequent depredations at the hands of the vikings.4
According to the Aidead Echach maic Maireda, found in LU, the
lake was formed from the urine of a horse given to Ribh by the
fairy king Mider.5 A monster that dwelt beneath its waters was
slain by Finn mac Cumhail (Transactions of the Ossianic Society,
II, Dublin, 1855, p. 55; VI [1861], 122). The Irish notes to the
Martyrology of Oengus6 contain an account of Fuinche the Rough,
who was so called because " when they sought to wed her to a husband
.... she sprang into Lough Erne and passed under water, both
fresh water and sea, till she appeared at Inis Clothrann [now Quaker's
Island, in Loch Ree] and came to Diarmait,7 who asked her on what
business she was bound. Then she tells him her tales, and thus was
she, with shells and sea-slime (turscair [var., trustur] muiride) cleaving
to her."

The story of the monastery beneath the lake and of Caenchom-
rac's sojourn therein appears to be of local origin and, in its present
form, is the work of a writer who was acquainted with the monastic
tradition represented by the annals. It is more or less closely

1 There is said to be a life of Mochta in Colgan's Ada sanctorum, but this work is
not accessible to me in Chicago.

2 Cf. James Woods, Annals of Westmeath, Ancient and Modern, Dublin, 1907, pp. 145,
148 ff.; T. O. Russell, Beauties and Antiquities of Ireland, London, 1897, pp. 47 ff.;
John O'Donovan, Tribes and Customs of Hy-Many, p. 10; P.M., I, p. 557, note f.

3 Annals of Clonmacnois, ed., Denis Murphy, Dublin, 1896, ad an. 547; Journal of
the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 1901, p. 69. See further Dom Louis Gougaud,
Les Chretientes celtiques, Paris, 1911, p. 103, and the works there cited.

* Cf. Annals of Ireland: Three Fragments, ed., John O'Donovan (Irish Archaeological
and Celtic Society), Dublin, 1860, passim; Margaret Stokes, Early Christian Architec-
ture in Ireland, London, 1878, p. 99. One of the prerogatives of the king of Cruachain
was "to have a fleet on Loch Ri" (Leabhar na g-Ceart, ed., John O'Donovan [Celtic
Society], Dublin, 1847, p. 265). See further James Woods, op. cit., p. 149 f.

s Silva Gadelica, I, 233 ff.; II, 265 ff. Cf. Rev. Celt., XV (1894), 482 f.

6 Martyrology of Oengus: Felire 6engusso, ed., Whitley Stokes [Henry Bradshaw
Society], London, 1905, p. 51.

i Patron saint of the island ; fl. c. 540. Cf . Mart, of Oengus, p. 35 ; Mart, of Gorman, p. 13.

446

PSALTER OF THE PIG," AN IRISH LEGEND 103

paralleled by many accounts of sunken churches, castles, and cities
and of visits made by mortals to the subaqueous world in medieval
romance and in modern folk-lore.1

Early Celtic tradition is particularly rich in accounts of uncanny
swine.2 One of the oldest and best-known Irish stories is that of
the pigs of Derbrenn, which were human beings transformed into
animals.3

TEXT OF THE SALTAIR NA MUICE FROM THE
BOOK OF FERMOY

Seel Saltrach na Muic annso sis.

Espuc amrai boi hi Cluain maic N6is, Coenchomrach Indsi Endoim a
ain[m]. Do muintir Degad a ceinel, 7 dia oilethn dochuaid .... (?)4
uail. Ba mor tra a airmitin a Cluain, ar [r]ofindadh anti dib nogebadh
fochraicc [no pian no-]fuiged, 7 atbeiread raithi reim .... 5nogeibedh
bdss. An tan ba mor [le]is onoir a Cluain, — oir no-adairsed he amal faith

iln addition to the citations enumerated in Modern Philology, XII (1915), 603,
nn. 2 and 3 (cf. Modern Philology, XIII [1916], 731 ft.), see T. C. Croker, Researches in the
South of Ireland, London, 1824, p. 98; Edward Davies, Mythology and Rites of the British
Druids, London, 1809, p. 146; Rhys, Celtic Folk-Lore, I, pp. 74, 191 f., 381 ff.; II, 426 flf.
436 flf.; Arthur C. L. Brown, Anniversary Papers by Colleagues and Pupils of George
Lyman Kittredge, Boston and London, 1913, pp. 236 flf.; Ulster Journal of Archaeology
VII (1859), 348; Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends of Ireland, rev. ed., London, 1899, p. 248;
M. A. Courtney, Cornish Feasts and Folk-Lore, Penzance, 1890, pp. 66 ff.; Robert Hunt;
Popular Romances of the West of England, a new impression, London, 1916, pp. 189 flf.,
Robert C. Hope, Legendary Lore of the Holy Wells of England: Including Rivera, Lakes,
Fountains, and Springs, London, 1893, pp. 132, 181; J. P. Campbell, Popular Tales of
the West Highlands, London, III (1892), 421 flf.; Marie Trevelyan, Folk-Lore and Folk-
Stories of Wales, London, 1909, pp. 11 flf. Fletcher S. Bassett (Sea Phantoms: or Legends
and Superstitions of the Sea and of Sailors, Chicago, 1892, p. 480) tells a modern Irish
yarn connected with the town of Kilkokeen, which, like the monastery in the Saltair
na muice, lies beneath the Shannon River. "It was said that, in 1823, a boat's crew of
fifteen men were seen in church, who came from this subaqueous village, to receive
spiritual consolation. The legend further relates that a ship came into the river one
night, and anchored here at the wharves of a fine city. The next morning, one of the
inhabitants came aboard, and engaged them to go to Bordeaux; and the day after their
return with a rich cargo, the city sank and never reappeared." According to a Shrop-
shire tradition, a monastery once stood on the ground now occupied by Colemere. A
spring near the monastery burst forth and overwhelmed it. The chapel bells may still
be heard ringing at certain times (C. S. Burne, Shropshire Folk-Lore, p. 67). For a
church overwhelmed by water and "now represented on dry land only by a hermit in
a violent hurry," see Celtic Review, III (1906-7), 273. See, further, Paul S6billot, Le
Folk-Lore des Pecheurs, Paris, 1901, p. 359 flf., and Franz Schmarsel, Literarhistorische
Forschungen, Heft 53, Berlin, 1913, pp. vi-viii (Bibliog.), pp. 62 flf.

* Cf. Rhys, Celtic Folklore, II, 501 flf.; J. A. MacCulloch, The Religion of the Ancient
Celts, Edinburgh, 1911, pp. 209 flf.; see further Transactions of the Kilkenny Archaeological
Society, II, 303 flf.; Revue celtique, XV (1894), 475.

» Revue celtique, XV (1894), 471.

« "erb eb" ( ?) at the end of a line.

» "reim" at the end of a line.

447

104 TJOM. PEETE CROSS

— as ed dorinde: teact cu hlnis Endaim for Loch Rf di oilithri, ar ba huain
leis fri hort 7 oifrend. Batar tra drem dia manchaib-sium, 7 no-aithigdis
for tir amach ar cend almsan 7 phrimiti fer Teabtha, or bdtar fir Tethfa
a ngeillsine cu mor dosom .i. an cet ore 7 an cet loeg 7 an cet uan 7 bairgen
gacha loisti, 7 ni berthi a n-dr tar nonmor acht cu mbeitis fa ciss dosom, 7
dixit:

"Adlochar dom rfg;

fir Tebthai dia tfr

ni ragonsat neck,

nfr gonad nech dib.

"Atbeirim-si frib, —
ni fa bee an bad —
acht cu luaite me",
bid n6nmor bar n-ar.

"Ocus gid uathad daib," or se, "ocus gid sochaide bess an bar n-aighaid,
acht cu nderntai m'umrad-sa (?), do soisti sla"n.

"N6nmar a Tebthai tririg,
roed mili do mflib,
denat Coencomrac d'imrad,
roisid imshkm dd rir[ib]."

Do-bid-siwm itir Cluain 7 Inis Endoim .i. seal . . . .( ?)* Aroili la n-and
dosom an Inis [Endoim] lotar na manaig asin indsi. Lotar Eog[an 7 Ecer-
tach d]d bronndaltai an cl[eirigh] .i. da mhac Aedacdin [d'fb] Maine, cu
rangatar Sliab Liat[r]o[ma a n-Ib Maine]. Din bdtar ua Fannain oc seilc
gur marbsat traed (?) do mucaib altai. Dorads[at] banb dona cleirchib.
Tuesad tra na cl[e"irig] an banb-sin leo co hlnis Endoim. Curset forsin
ngabail boi os cind na teined. Tiagait fein for fud na hindsi do gabail a
salm. Fagaibt[er] Coencomrac na henar sin durtaigh. Nir cia[n] do cu
faca an seal mor cuice a bun na tuinde. Bendaigis don cleirech. Bendcais
an cleirech dosom. "Can tanaigais, a chleirig?" or Coenchomrac. "Don
tuind-si amuig," ol an fer mor. "Cid tuc sund?" or Coencomrac. "A
ndiaid na muice ut," or seisem, 7 tuc a osnaid os airt a carad. "€red
sin ?" or Coencomrac. "Ni^awsa/'orse. " Mainistir fil linde san . . . .(?)"2

"[C]red sin?" or Caencomhruc. "Ni hansa" or se. "Mainistir fil linne

1 "m and dib( ?)" at the beginning of a line.

2 MS, "sei" (?) at the end of a line. On the next line the scribe adds: Don leitsi
amuig don duilleoig ata in cuid eli don scel-s[o]: The rest of this story is overleaf.
The remainder of the column is occupied by a memorandum. Cf. Proceedings -of the
Royal Irish Academy, Irish MSS Series, I, No. 1, p. 21. The tale is continued in a different
hand on p. 56.

448

"THE PSALTER OF THE PIG," AN IRISH LEGEND 105

f6n loch-sa anois, 7 doronsad macaim na mainistreich . . . .1 [imjmar-
baidh cor cu[i]red amach iat hi rachtaib muc, 7 is iat do marbadh hi sleib
Liathtroma, 7 is aen dibside inti fil forsan ngabail ugud, 7 is meisi a athair
collaide on, 7 ac so duid sunn a shaltair am' laim-si, 7 dobeirira duid-si hi,
a C[h]aencomhruic, ar n-aentadh 7 for anmuin inti diar rofoghain cusan-
iugh, or da maradh budhein e, is maith doregerudh in sthalm gabail."
Salt air na Muice alberthai fria iarsin, 7 romair si fri ciana iarsin hi Cluain
mac Nois. An banbh adberthae fri hEoghan 7 ba he-sin in banbh re ....
oel ( ?)2 tuirc. Cedaigis in cleirich don fhir moir (?) a mhac do breith lais
dia adhnacul. Faemais. " [Ci]d duit, a Chaenchomraic, gan techt limsa do
fheg[a]dh na mainisdrech ?" Lodar diblfnaib fon loch [issi]n mainistir.
Tic Caencomrac on trdth go roile [i]nte oc urd 7 oc oiffrind. Machtnaighidh
[in n-in]adh (?) 7 a haine. " Ni hannsa la Dia," ol in cleirech, " [ar n-aitr]eb
fo uisci inas isna hinadaib ele." [Ocus tic] Caencomrac iarnabaruch dia
thigh 7 se [Ian] do urscur in locha, 7 no-athaighed [. . . . c]o minic don
mainisdir-sin in cen [do m]air ( ?) Nf bidh dichleith fair fnte [o sin am]ach.
Teighdis iarum cleirigh Locha Ri g[ach Di]ardain Case do Inis Endoimh
do [shaigidh Chaejnchonum'c ar daigh ola do coisercadh. [Dognf]dh-sum
tra ort ocus oifrinn 7 co[ . . . . proic]ept gacha Diardain Case. [Ba
gnathr f]leadugad issin lo sin iar n-urd [7 iar n-aifreann. Doberar]iarum
linn 7 biadh dona cl[e*irchib amail doberth]ad( ?) dogres. Luidh Caen-
com[rac uaithib imjach combai irmhor in lae ina n-egmais. Tig dia saigidh
iarum 7 iad ag praindiugwl Bennachcws doib; bennoc/isat-sumh dosumh
on mudh cedna. Doci tra na misa Ian do shaill occa . . . .3 oca tomailt
ga baidh for a cairiugwd im tomhailt na sailli isin Co[r]gus co tard cursugwd
m6r forro, 7 rogab fere 7 lonnws mor e", curfas bruth dermhair air conar
fedsat fegadh in aghaidh la ruithnem na diac/^a bai in a ghnuis. Teit
Caencomrac uatha amach iarsin 7 ni facws riam asa haithli, 7 ni feass in
fo an loch dochuaidh do aitreab isin mainistir do scarudh fri cleasrudh in
thsaeghail 7 na cUirech no in aingil rostogaib docum nime, 7 nir chaitset
sruithe na nGaideal feoil issin Chaplait osin amach.

Fin[it].

TRANSLATION

The Tale of the Psalter of the Pig here.

There was a noble bishop in Clonmacnoise; Caenchomrac of Inis
Endaim was his name, his kinship was of the muinter Dega. And on his
pilgrimage he went [to Clonmacnoise .... ?]. Great then was the

» Erasure in MS.

2 "oel( ?)" at the beginning of a line. Read "beol" as in Li» t

s Erasure in MS.

449

106 TOM PEETE CROSS

reverence paid him in Cluain; for he would learn whether any one of them
should have reward or punishment, and he would tell the quarter of the
year .... in which he should die. When the honor paid him at Clon-
macnoise became too great in his eyes, — for they revered him as a prophet
— what he did was to go to Inis Endaim in Loch Ree for a pilgrimage,
because in that place he thought there was leisure enough for performing
the canonical order and for mass.

[With him] there was a company of his monks, and they used to go
out upon the mainland for the alms and first-fruits of the men of Teffia.1
For the men of Teffia were greatly in submission to him! to wit, the first
pigling and the first calf and the first lamb and a loaf for every kneading
trough; and their slain should not be more than nine provided they were
under cess to him.2 And he said:

"I give thanks to my King!
The men of Teffia, for their land
They have slain no one ( ?) ;
None of them has been slain.

"I say unto you, —
Not small the friendship —
Provided only you invoke me,
Your slain shall be nine.

"And though there be few of you," said he, "and though there be a
multitude opposed to you, provided only you think of me (?), you shall
reach safety.

"Nine men out of melodious Teffia
Against (?) a hundred thousand of thousands, —
Let them think on Caenchomrac;
Verily they shall reach safety."

For a while he dwelt between Cluain and Inis Endaim, first in one,
then in the other ( ?). One day, while he was in Inis [Endaim], the monks
went out of the island. There went Eogan [and Ecertach], two dear dis-
ciples of the cleric, the two sons of Aedacan of [Hy-]Many, till they reached
Slieve Leitrim [in Hy-Many]. There the Ui Fannain were, hunting, and
they killed a number ( ?) of wild pigs. They gave a pigling to the clerics.

1 A district comprising parts of the present counties of Westmeath and Longford.
John O' Donovan, The Topographical Poems of John O' Dubhagain, etc. (Irish Archaeological
and Celtic Society), Dublin, 1862, notes, p. ix. Cf. Revue celtique, XVI (1895), 80.

2 An Irish life of St. Grellan, the patron saint of the Hy-Maine, gives gach ced arc
is gac ced uan (every firstling pig and every firstling lamb) as part of the tribute paid
by the tribe to Grellan. (O'Donovan, Tribes and Customs of Hy-Many, p. 13.) E singulis
ManachicB domibus patroni sui S. Grillani successoribus tres denarii quotannis, primus
porculus, primus agnua, et primus equinus, deferebantur. (Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus*
ed., Kelly, II, 508.

450

"THE PSALTER OF THE PIG," AN IRISH LEGEND 107

Then the clerics carried the pigling with them to Inis Endaim. They
placed it on the fork that was over the fire. They on their part go about
the island to chant their psalms. Caenchomrac is left alone in the oratory.
He was not long so till he saw a great phantom coming toward him out
the bottom of the water. [The phantom] saluted the cleric; the cleric
saluted him. "Whence hast thou come, O cleric?" said Caenchomrac.
"Out of the water," said the big man. "What brought thee here?" said
Caenchomrac. "[I have come] for the pig yonder," said the former, and
sighed ....(?). "What's that?" said Caenchomrac. "Not hard to
answer," said he. "We have a monastery in the .... (?)."*

"What's that?" said Caenchomrac. "Not hard to answer," said he.
"We have a monastery under this lake now. And the young men of the
monastery committed sin, so that they have been put out in the form of
pigs, and it is they who were killed in Slieve Leitrim. And one of them is
he on the fork yonder, and I am his mortal father. And here is his psalter
in my hand, and to thee I give it, 0 Caenchomrac, . . . . ( ?)2 of our union
and for the soul of the person whom it served until to-day, for if he himself
now lived, it is well he would have arranged the psalm-singing." Thereafter
it was called the Psalter of the Pig, and it remained for a long time in Clon-
macnoise. Eogan was called in Banbh, for he was the pigling with a boar's
mouth (?). The cleric permitted the big man to take his son with him to
bury him. He consented. "Why not come with me, 0 Caenchomrac, to
see the monastery?" They went together under the lake into the monas-
tery. Caenchomrac remains in it from one canonical hour till the cor-
responding one next day performing canonical service and mass. He
wonders at the place (?) and its delightfulness. "It is as easy for God,"
said the cleric, "[to cause us to dwell (lit., our dwelling)] under water as
in other places." [And] on the morrow Caenchomrac [goes] home, and he
[covered with] lake wrack.3 And he used often to visit that monastery as
long as he lived ( ?) ; nothing was hidden from him therein from that time
forth.

Afterwards the clerics of Loch Ree used to go every Easter Thursday
to Inis Endaim to [visit] Caenchomrac that he might consecrate oil for them.
He used to celebrate canonical service and mass and .... preaching
every Easter Thursday. A banquet [was usual] on that day after the
celebration of the hours [and mass]. Thereupon food and drink [is given]
to the clerics [as it was always given (?)]. Caenchomrac went out [from
them] and was absent from them during the greater part of the day There-
after he comes to them while they were at meat. He greeted them; they

1 For the gap, see p. 448, n. 2, above.

2 Though no gap is apparent at this point in the manuscript, something seems to
be missing.

8 Compare Fuinche's condition in the story given above, p. 446.

451

108 TOM PEETE CROSS

greeted him in the same manner. Then he sees the platters full of bacon,
and them eating it. Thereupon he took to chiding them for eating the
bacon in Lent, and he reproved them severely. And great anger and
indignation seized him so that his wrath increased mightily, and they
could not look him in the face because of the brilliance of the godliness in
his countenance. Then Caenchomrac goes out from them,* and he was
never seen afterwards. And it is not known whether he went to dwell
under the lake in the monastery so as to shut himself off from the reveling
of the world and of the clerics or whether the angels took him up to Heaven.
And from that time forth the wise ones of the Gael have never eaten flesh
on Maunday Thursday.1

TEXT OF THE SALT AIR NA MUICE FROM THE MODERN
MANUSCRIPTS

Easpuc2 uasal rdbdi i Cluain maic Nois, Caon Comrac a ainm 7 Mochta
a ainm ar tus. Mac oighi he" 7 comharba De, 7 da oilithri decimal co
Cluain maic N6is. Ba mor tra3 a airmitin 7 a4 chadhus i Cluain, aro fmnadb
o Dia gac sen dibh no gheabed ba"s in fuighbec? fochraic no in fuigh[b]edh
pian, 7 no indisedh do chdch in bhliadhain do gheibedh bds in ra"ithi deddTmach
don bhliadain a imt[h]us. Ba m6r lais iarwm a6 airmhitin i Cluain, 7
tdinic co hlnnis Eandaimh for Loch Ri a ailithre do dheadnamh7 innti, ar
ba huaignech8 leis hi fria hord 7 aifreann 7 irnaighihi.

Bhatar dream uruaighthec do mhanchat'6 na fharradh fnnte, 7 no
the"ightis for tir immach air ceann almsain 7 primhidin i Teathbha, ar do
bhatar fir Theabhtha i n-geillsine mh6ir dho .i. cead arc 7 cead laegh 7 cead

1 Cf. Whitley Stokes, Lives of Saints from the Book of Lismore (Anec. Oxon.), Oxford,
1890, s.v. caplait in Index. On the consecration of oil, the feast (in commemoration of
the Last Supper), and other ceremonies of Maunday Thursday (the fifth day of Holy
Week), see Brand, Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, ed., W. C. Hazlitt, I (London,
1870), p. 84; K. A. H. Kellner, Heortology, a History of the Christian Festivals from Their
Origin to the Present Day, London, 1908, p. 72; Gr. Rietschel, Lehrbuch der Liturgik
(Sammlung von Lehrbiichern der praktischen Theologie), I (Berlin, 1900), 197. On
the severity of the Lenten Rule in Celtic monasteries, see P. E. Warren, The Liturgy and
Ritual of the Celtic Church, Oxford, 1881, p. 146.

* 28. C. 19 lacks title. 24. B. 27, "Sgeal air Loch Ri"; 23. M. 47, "Psaltair na
Muice annso"; 23. M. 50, "Saltair na Muice annso." O'Grady's text is headed:
"Imthecht Caenchomraic."

» 24. B. 27, 23. M. 47, and 23. M. 50, "trath."

* 24. B. 27, 23. M. 47, and 23. M. 50 omit.

6 24. B. 27, "arna fionnad"; 23. M. 47, and 23. M. 50, "ara flonnadh."

« Omitted in 23. M. 50.

•> 23. C. 19, "7 a ailiUre do dheadnamh"; 23. M. 47 and 23. M. 60, "do deanamh
a oilithre."

8 23. C. 19, "huaingec."

452

"THE PSALTER OF THE PIG," AN IRISH LEGEND 109

uan1 7 bairghion gacha loisdi 7 screapal gacha caiihreach, 7 nac rachadh a
n-ar dar nonbar acht co mbeidis fo screapaZ dosom, amail isbert:

"Atlocar2 dom rfgh;
fir Teabhtha dia tfr,
nf r6 ghonsat neach,
gonad neach dibh.3

"Adeirim-si fribh, —
nf ba brec in ba"dh,4 —
mad6 luatte me,
bid nonbur bar n-a"r.

"7 deirim fn'o-se,6 gid sochaidi bes in bar tograim, giamba huathadh
doibh, acht co nder[n]tai m'imrath-sa, ragthai slan," dia n-ebert:7

"Nowbwr a Teabhtha8 thiri,
fri9 cet mile dho mih'6,
denat Caencomrac dh'imradh,
raghat imshlcm dia tiribh.10

"Nl berat buidhine a mbuadha
dho shluaga domon cia,
acht co mbiad11 cum fhoghnadTi-sa,
is am12 fhoghnadh dho Dhia."

Dobhf-siam13 amlaidh sin idir Chluain 7 Inis Endaimh seal. Feacht dia
mbui in Inis Endaimh, lotar na maxiaigh immach. Luid Eogdn 7 Eicertach,
da mac ^Edhacain14 d'Ibh Maine, da bTon[n]dhalthadh in chlemgh co rdnn-
catar sliabh Liatroma a n-Ib Maine. Is ann batar I Fannain15 oc seilg isin

1 "cead arc — uan": 28. M. 47 and 23. M. 50, "cead tian 7 c6ad 6rc 7 c^ad laodh."
For "ore" 24. B. 27 reads: "tore."

2 S4. B. 27, 23. M. 47, and 23. M. 50 omit this and the following stanza.

3 For the last two lines Lis. has:

"nir gonadh nech dhibh,

ni ro gonsat nech."
« Lis., "bagh."

8 Lie. adds "dia."

6 7 — "frib-se": Lis., "Ocus dono for s6."

i 7 deirim — "n-ebert": omitted in 24. B. 27, 23. M. 47, and 23. M. 60.
8 23. C. 19, "Teadbha (?)."
• 24. B. 27, 23. M. 47., and 23. M. 50, "fria."

10 "dia tiribh": 84. B. 27, "do riribh"; Lis., "dia tirib"; 23. M. 47 and 23. M. 50,
"dS riribh."

" 23. M. 47, "mbeara"; S3. M. 50, "mbearadh(?)."
" Omitted in 24. B. 27, 23. M. 47, and 23. M. 50; Lis., "m'.M
1*24. B. 27, 23. M. 47, and 23. M. 50, "Dobhi."
1*24. B. 27, 23. C. 19, "^Edhacan"; Lis.~" Aedhacan."
» 24. B. 27, 23. M. 47, and 23. M. 50, "Flainn."

453

110 Tcfot PEETE CROSS

tsleibh. [7] ro mharbsat1 drecht do mhucuibh aKtha ann,2 7 do radsat
bandh do na clerchibh dhibh, 7 tucsat leo dia tigh e" 7 r6 chuirset for sin
ngabdil i cind na temedh. 7 mar dobhi in cleireach a gabail a shalm co
facaidh in fer mor chuici 6 bhim na tuinne asin loch. Becmnachais don
chlei'rech 7 beemnachus in clei'rech dosum. "Is maith (ar se) na freicearao^3
in tf ata forsin ng[a]bhail i cind na temedh thu, 7 na ghebhadh4 salma leat.5
"Cread sin itir 6n?"6 ar Csencomrac. "Ninsa(air se). Mainistir fil lindi
f6n loch-so thios, ar ni dailghi lasin ccoimhdhi aitribh daine f6 na hu[i]scibh7
ina isna hindadaife/i aili; 7 do ronsat macaeimh na mannaistreach imarbhus
co ro chuirit imach i richt muc 7 corab iat8 ro marbadh aniugh i sliabh Liat-
roma, 7 aen dibh sin intf fil for sin ngabhail i cinn na temedh, 7 is misi a
athar coHaidhe, 7 ac so a shaltar am laimh, 7 doberim duit si i.9 Saltair na
nuici atberthi fria iarum, 7 romhair10fri re fada i Cluain mac Nois. In bandh
dono at berthi fri hEogan 7 badh hesin in banbh fri be*ol tuirc. 711 ceadaidus
Csencomhrac dosom a bhreith12 leis dia adhnacul. "Cidh duit, a chleirigh
(ar se) nac tice limsa djfe"ghad na mannistreach ita fon loch so shfos ?"13
"Ragat" (ar Csencowroc). Lotar in dis fon loch 7 tiagat isin mammsdir
7 tic Caencomrae on trdth co araili innte, 7 tic arnabharach14 da tigh 7 s6
Ian do thruscur in locha. 7 do tathcwd[edh] co minic fon loch, 7 nl bfdh
dicleidh do uirre o sin imach cein ba beao.

Tictis cleirigh Locha Ri gach Dardain Case co hlnis Endoim do shaigidh
C&ncomraic fo daigin15 ola do choisrecadh16 dh6ibh 7 do ghnldh17 som aid 7
aifreann, 7 coisrecod/i18 ola 7 pr6iceapt d6ibh. Ba gndth fleaghoc/iws19 isin
lo sin iar n-ord 7 iar n-aifreann. Doberar20 iarum linn 7 bia dona cleirchib

1 23. M. 47 and 28. M. 50, "7 ro mharbhud."

2 "ro mharbsat — ann": omitted in #4. B. 27. "alltha ann": S3. M . 47 and
2S. M. 50, "allta san tsiliabh"; Lis., "allaid ann."

» 24. B. 27, "ro freagradh"; 28. M. 47 and 23. M. 50, "no freagrodft."

< 24. B. 27, "ro ghebhadh"; 23. M. 47, "ro geabhadh"; 23. M. 50, "no geabhadh."

B 23. M. 47, "riot."

• "itir on"; 24. B. 27, 23. M. 47, and 28. M. 50 omit.
» 23. M. 47 and 28. M. 50, "huisgidhibh."

s "corab iat": 28. M. 47 and 28. M. 60, "gurbacM iadh."

• "duit si 1": 24. B. 27, 23. M. 47, and 28. M. 60, "si dhuit i."
" 23. M. 47 and 23. M. 60, "ro marbh (!)."

« "In bandh dono — tuirc 7": omitted in 24. B. 27, 28. M. 47, and 23. M. 60.
" "a bhreith": 24. B. 27, 23. M. 47, and 28. M. 60, "an bhanbh do bhreith."
« "so shlos": 28. C. 19, "fa thios." Lis., "sa tis."
" 24. B. 27, 23. M. 47, and 28. M. 50, "arabarach."
» 28. C. 19 and 24. B. 27, "daingin."

""ola do choisrecadh": 23. M. 50; 23. C. 19, "ola coisraca"; 24. B. 27, "ola
choisraca"; Lis., "ola do choisercadh."

17 "do ghnidh"; 28. M. 47, "do ni."

18 Lis., "coisercadh."
« Lis., "fledhugad."

2° 23. M. 47 and 23. M. 50, "doberthar."

454

"THE PSALTER OF THE PIG," AN IRISH LEGEND 111

amaZ do-berthf do ghre"s. Luidh Caencomrac u&ithibh imach 7 tic1 urmh6r
in lai na n-ecmus, 7 tic2 dia saighit3 iar sin isin tec i mbdtar ic promniughadh,
7 beanachus dofbh 7 beanaighid* dosum o'n6 modh c&idna. Atchi na
miasa Ian do shaill aca ica6 tomuilt 7 gabhus for7 a cairiugad? im thomuilt
na saille isin Cargha[i]s, 7 dorat cursachod m6r forra, 7 r6ghabh ferg 7
lonnus dermair e condr fheefeat fe*ghad na aigidh fri ruithneacA na diadhac^a
bui in a ghmi[i]s. Teithit9 na cle*iricc roimhe 7 ronghab crith 7 omhan in
shaeilocAfa.10 Teait11 Caencomrac immach uatha12 7 nf fhacus13 6 sin ille. 7 ni
feas in f6n14 loch dochuaidh do ditreabh isin mainisdir do16 fhoghnamh do
Dhia 7 do dheodhdhaine fri forbannuibh arsata,16 no an17 aingil rucsat a
anam18 dochum nimhe. 7 nfr chaithsiat sruithi Gaeidal fe6il Charghais
da19 aithle sin.

1 Leg. "tuc" (cf. Silva Gadelica I, 89).
*«4. B. 27, 23. M. 47, and 23. M. 60, "tigeadh."
» 24. B. 27, 23. M. 47, and 23. M. 60, "theigh."

« 23. C. 19, adds " Caoncomrach." For " beanaighid" Lis. reads " bennachais each."
s 23. M. 47 and 23. M. 50, "ar an."
« 24. B. 27, "ag."

* 24. B. 27, 23. M. 47, and 23. M. 60, "ag."
» 24. B. 27, "ccairtiughadh."
»23. M. 47, "teithe"; Lis., "teichit."

w "in shaeilocfaa": 24. B. 27, 23. M. 47, and 23. M. 50, "do faoloctoa."
« "crith — Teait": omitted in Lis.
« 23. C. 19, "uath"; omitted in 24. B. 27.
" "ni fhacus": 23. C. 19, "fhacthus"; 24. B. 27, "fhacus."
" Lis., "to."
« Lis., "co."

" "do dAeodhdhaine — arsata": 24. B. 27, 23. M. 47, and 23. M. 60, "doscarthan
fhria claoindeacraibh daoinne"; Li*., "do .... ocus fri forbannuibh arsata."
" Omitted in IBS. C. 19.
u 23. M. 60, "ainm."
» "Charghais da": 24. B. 27, 23. M. 47, and 23. M. 50, "san Caplait na."

TOM PEETE CROSS

UNIVERSITY OP CHICAGO

455

Modern Philology

VOLUME XVIII

'January IQ2I NUMBER 9

THE MIDLAND PRESENT PLURAL INDICATIVE
ENDING -e(n)

On the side of form, the present plural indicative ending -e(n)
is probably the most marked single characteristic of the Midland
dialect. It is, accordingly, of sufficient importance to justify an
effort both to determine precisely its earliest currency and to con-
sider carefully the problem of its origin.

A precise determination of the occurrence of this termination
in the Earliest Middle English material of Midland provenience —
the later entries and interpolations in the Peterborough Chronicle —
has not been made either in Meyer's1 study of the language of these
sections or in the glossary of Plummer's generally admirable edition
of the Chronicles.2 The significant forms occur in the specifically
Peterborough insertions made by the first scribe, who wrote appar-
ently in 1121, in the contemporaneous entry for 1127, and in the
entry for 1137, which was not made before 1154.3

In the insertions made in 1121 there are six forms in -n which
both Plummer in his glossary and Meyer consider present plural
indicatives.4 In addition Plummer properly glosses as indicative

1 H. Meyer, Zur Sprache der jilngeren Teile der Chronik von Peterborough (Jena, 1889) .

* Charles Plummer, Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel, etc., 2 vols. (Oxford,
1892. 1899).

» Concerning the scribes of this chronicle see Pliunmer, Vol. II, Introduction,
pp. xxxv and xlvii. Concerning the Peterborough insertions in the earlier annals see
Plummer, Vol. II, Introduction, p. xlv and n. 1, and Meyer, Vorwort. pp. iv-v.

« The forms as they appear in Plummer's text are liggen, p. 30, 1. 36; liggan, p. 31, 1. 2;
louien, p. 32, 1. 10; hauen, p. 36, 1. 6; lin, p. 116, 11. 11, 21. The forms given by Meyer
are listed on pp. 80, 83-84, 104 of his study.
4571 121 [MODEBN PHILOLOGY, January, 1921

122 'W. F. BRYAN

geornon, which Meyer lists as optative, and be (with loss of final n),
which Meyer does not enter at all. The former is under the year
656 (Plummer, p. 33, 1. 12), and the latter under the year 675
(Plummer, p. 37, 1. 24). Both are in simple relative clauses which
do not express any idea of contingency and in which normal syntax
clearly requires the indicative. In these entries by the first scribe
is a plural in-<? (liggefi), anno 656, which both Plummer and Meyer
enter. In this same annal is a plural seip (Plummer, p. 33, 1. 6),
which Plummer glosses correctly but which Meyer does not record —
"Swa beo hit, seip alle. Amen." Under 675 (Plummer, p. 37, 1. 18)
is a Uggefi which Meyer incorrectly enters as plural and which in
Plummer's glossary is merely included with others as "pres. sg. & pi."
That it is singular is apparent from the text: "Nu gife ic S~e Peter
.... pas landes u eal p pser to liggeS." Both the actual plurals
in-^(#) occur in accounts of grants of land to the monastery of
Peterborough, and their archaic form may thus very well have been
copied or imitated from earlier genuine or spurious documents.

To make clear the situation in the annal for 1127, the quotation
of two brief passages is necessary. The chronicler, in characterizing
a disreputable Abbot Henry, compares him to a drone in a hive of
bees: "I>aer he wunede eall riht swa drane do5 on hiue. Eall p pa
beon dragen toward, swa frett pa drane a dragad fraward." Some-
what later, as preliminary to an account of this abbot's intimacy
with fiends, the chronicler asseverates: "Ne pince man na sellice
£ we so9 seggen, for hit was ful cu9 ofer eall land p," etc.
Meyer enters both dragen and seggen as plural indicatives, dofi
as singular, is doubtful about dragafi,1 and does not enter frett
at all. Plummer, on the contrary, glosses dragen and seggen as sub-
junctive, andfdoft, dragafi, and frett (which he considers miswritten
for fretafi) as plurals. There is, however, no syntactic warrant for
regarding dragen and seggen as anything but indicatives. The evi-
dence, too, is that doft, dragafi, and frett are singulars. In the first
place, the sense demands the singular: in the statement "pser he
wunede eall riht swa drane do9 on hiue," the abbot would almost
certainly be compared to a single drone. If this is true, there is

i He lists dragad (p. 80) among singular forms, but adds "fraglich, ob. sg., konnte
auch als 3 pi. aufgefasst werden, da das Subject dazu (pa drane) vielleicht als Plural
anzusehen 1st."

458

[IDLAND PRESENT PLURAL INDICATIVE ENDING -e(ri) 123

certainly no occasion for a change to the plural in "swa frett pa drane
D dragaQ fraward." Secondly, there is nothing in any of these forms
to prevent their being considered singulars. In the interpolated
entry for 675 is an unquestioned singular dod; a singular in -a%
(singad)1 occurs in the very entry for 1127; and frett has very much
more the appearance of a syncopated third person singular (other
examples of which are noted by Meyer, pp. 80 and 83) than of a
miswritten plural fretad. Nor need pa drane be regarded as a plural
form. Several instances of pa as singular occur in this same entry
for 1127 — "Sa eorles sunu," "in pa tune," "fram pa selva tune" —
and the final -e of drane does not necessarily denote plurality, as
other originally long-stemmed feminine nouns show the extension of
this termination to the nominative singular.2 The evidence is
strong that the forms in-# (t) are singular and those in -en plural
indicative.

The annal for 1137 contains two forms in -en8 which both Meyer
and Plummer enter as present plural indicatives and no forms in
fi(p) which either regards as plurals.

In addition to the clearly indicative forms in -n that I have cited
from the interpolations by the first scribe, there are several others
that Meyer lists doubtfully as optatives and that Plummer glosses
as subjunctives.4 Though it is quite possible to construe them as
indicatives — in the same annals there are unmistakably singular
indicatives in -# in passages very similar to those containing these
plurals in -n — yet without the inclusion of forms at all doubtful the
evidence is ample as to usage in the Peterborough dialect. One
scribe writing in 1121 employed eight present plural indicative forms
in -n as compared with only two in -&(p), and even these two may
well have been copied or imitated from earlier originals; a second
about 1127 used two forms in -n and none in -#(£); and a third,
writing probably about 1154, also used two plurals in -n and none in
It is evident that in this section of Midland, by the middle

i "Glf hwa hit dofi," Plummer, p. 37, 1. 23; "man singaS," p. 258, 1. 7.

* Plummer, p. 29, 1. 14 — peode; p. 37, 11. 26, 29 — witnesse.

3 Both are on p. 265 of Plummer's text: lien, 1. 21, and willen, 1. 30.

« They include three occurrences of willen (wilen), all in the entry for 656, in Plum-
mer's text, p. 31, 11. 21, 29, 30; ofbreke and healden, anno 675, p. 31, 1. 21; and tobracon
and healdon, anno 963, p. 117, 11. 16, 17.

459

124 W. F. BRYAN

of the twelfth century, the newer present plural indicative termina-
tion in -n had come into currency, and had supplanted the older
corresponding ending in -#(/>)•

Though this termination had thus clearly come into currency at
the very beginning of the Middle English period, its use cannot,
I believe, be traced back into Old English, into Mercian — in general
the Old English correspondent to Midland.1 E. M. Brown, however,
in his study of the language of Rushworth1 presents apparent evidence
to the contrary in several forms which he is inclined to consider
"early examples of the 'extension' of -en to the pres. ind. pi."2
Unquestionably the verb forms in -e(n), -a(ri) cited by Brown
would be present plural indicatives in normal syntax; but Rushworth1 %
presents such anomalies in form and syntax that conclusions as to
actual usage cannot be properly based upon exceptional forms found
in this text. Though the glosser's general practice indicates clearly
that he felt the distinction between indicative and optative, he occa-
sionally employed one for the other.3 Somewhat frequently he used
the plural for the singular, and in at least one instance the preterite
for the present.4 Nor is this confusion confined to mood or tense

» The significant Mercian material is scant. The early documents — the earliest
glosses and the Vespasian Psalter — date so far before any unsettling of the Old English
grammatical system that they are serviceless on this point. The chief late Mercian
document, from the second half of the tenth century, is the interlinear gloss known as
Rushworth1, which extends through the Gospel of Matthew and into the fifteenth verse
of the second chapter of Mark. Though a gloss, it has much the character of continuous
discourse. It has a considerable intermixture of Saxon and Northumbrian forms. There
is also an interlinear gloss of a few short Latin pieces, the Royal Glosses, dating from about
the year 1000. Finally, there is a Life of St. Chad, a late text, which is preserved only
in a twelfth-century copy by a Southern scribe. The copy is apparently a fairly exact
reproduction of the original, though it shows some degree of Southern influence. For
bibliographical data on these late Mercian documents see K. D. Bttlbring, Altenglisches
Elementarbuch, Toil I, sec. 25 (Heidelberg, 1902), and the references indicated there.
For Rushworthi there should be added to these the second part of E. M. Brown's study »
The Language of the Rushworth Gloss, etc. (Gottingen, 1892) ; Uno Lindelof s Die Sud-
northumbrische Mundart des 10. Jahrhunderts: die Sprache der sog. Glosse Rushworth*,
sees. 4-7 (Bonn, 1901) ; and E. Schulte's Untersuchung der Beziehung der ae. Matthaus-
glosse im Rushworth Manuscript zu dem lateinischen Text der Handschrift (Bonn, 1903).

* See Brown, Language, Part II, pp. 40-44.

»For singular present optatives used instead of indicatives, see Skeat's text,
5:22; 5:29; 5:30; 10:39; 16:25; 18:19; 25:29; 27:43. For indicatives instead of opta-
tives, see 5:25; 5:34; 15:32; 23:15; 24:16, 17, 18; 27:64.

« Examples of the plural for the singular are in 2:22; 6:23; 20:2; 23:23; 25:15;
the preterite is used for the present in 21 :21.

460

MIDLAND PRESENT PLURAL INDICATIVE ENDING -e(n) 125

forms; even a cursory examination shows a great number of errors
that are purely capricious, without possible relation to grammar,
and thus of no consequence in linguistic history.1

Many of the errors and anomalies in Rushworth1 are probably
due to the method employed in composing it. E. Schulte2 has shown
that Rushworth1 was not based directly on the Rushworth Latin text,
which is of mixed Irish character, but that it had as supplementary
original a pure Vulgate text; in some instances it followed the reading
of one, in some that of the other, and in some it combined the readings
of both. Schulte refutes the possible theory that Rushworth1 was
merely a translation of a Latin original midway in character between
Rushworth and the Vulgate, or that it was the copy of a gloss made
from such an original, and he concludes that the glosser, Fannan,
while glossing Rushworth, must have had before him a second Latin
manuscript of pure Vulgate type. The most reasonable explanation
of this procedure is that the second manuscript contained an English
gloss. Far-man's task, then, probably was not so much translation
as adaptation of this Old English gloss of a Vulgate text to his
mixed Irish Rushworth text, the two differing in innumerable details.
Schulte also suggests that this presumptive Old English gloss of the

1 1 list some representative instances. Frequently an -n- is inserted, as in 4 :25, fylgen-
dun for fylg&dun ("secutae sun't") ; 6:13 conatungae for costungae. In 8:12 an inserted -n-
changes the form of a participle aworpene into that of the gerundive, and similarly in
20:24, 21:15, 24:49, 27:38. 44. Impossible syntactic combinations are numerous: in
1:17, " Omnes igitur genera tiones ab abraham usque ad dauid sunt xiiii" becomes " Ealra
cublice kneorissum from abrahame ol> to dauide feowertene kneorisse sint"; 4:6, "in
omnibus uis tuis" — "in allum weogas pine"; 10:1, "dedit eis potestatem spirituum
immundorum" — "salde heom rasehtao gastas unclenra"; 25:37, "Tune respondebunt
ei iusti " — " Ponne 3 swserigap him p»m sopfaeste." In at least one instance a Latin word,
instead of being translated, is incorporated into the English gloss: 24:49, "et coepit
percuterit [sic for per cuter e] conseruos suos et manducat et bibet cum ebris" — "onginna{>
slan efnpeu his manducat him ponne 3 drincet) mid druncennum." At times error results
apparently from a subconscious imitation of a Latin form, as in the pronouns of the fol-
owing passages: 5:16, "gloriflcent patrem uestrum" — "wuldrigae feeder eowrum";

8:21, "permitte me sepelire patrem meum" — "last me .... bebyrgen feeder

minum." Sometimes one form is used for another quite different in function, as oppe
for op in 1:17, where usque ad is twice rendered oppe to, and similarly in 18:21. Finally,
the glosser regularly misinterprets the Latin adjective nequam, with the result that
the passage in which it occurs is rendered into unintelligible nonsense, as in 6:23, "Si
autem oculus tuus nequam est totum corpus tuum tenebrosum erit" — "Gif pin ege ne
bid nan eall pin lichoma beof> Seostni." In 13:38 nequam is rendered by nanegu and in
20:15 by nawiht. The errors listed here are of course merely representative and form
but a very small proportion of the whole number to be found in Rushworth1.

• Op. cit., pp. 9-23.

461

126 W. F. BRYAN

Vulgate was in a Saxon dialect, and he thus provides the most satis-
factory explanation of the presence of Saxon forms in Rushworth1.1

Exceptional forms in a gloss like Rushworth1, composite in struc-
ture and abounding in capricious errors and impossible syntactic
combinations, provide no basis on which to found conclusions as to
actual usage. The occasional occurrence in this text of forms in
-e(n), -a(ri) where normal syntax requires the present plural indicative,
accordingly, cannot be regarded as evidence that the later distinctive
Midland termination had already come into use at the time this
gloss was composed. The significant material in the other late
Mercian texts is very scant, but what there is points clearly to the
persistence of the earlier termination in :/>(#). In the Royal Glosses
are only four instances of the present plural indicative — one an
uncompleted forgef and the other three ending in #(/>). In the Life
of St. Chad are eight present plural indicatives in -$(p), in addition
to a single beofi, and there is none in -en. Trustworthy evidence is
thus lacking for the use of the ending in question in Mercian texts
of the Old English period; the earliest certain instances are those
in the Peterborough Chronicle.

The accepted explanations of the origin of this characteristic
Midland ending are that it was transferred into the present indicative
plural from the present optative plural,2 or that it made its way into
the present plural indicative through the analogy of the plural forms
of the present optative and the preterite indicative and optative.3
These explanations have been generally accepted, apparently not
because investigation has shown them to be well grounded, but
because no other source of this termination has suggested itself.

1 Op. cit., p. 30. On pp. 18-19 Schulte cites a number of striking examples of con-
flations in which the readings of both the Vulgate and the Rushworth Latin texts are
combined; one of these is the second half of 5 :44, in which Rushworth apparently equates
an indicative with an optative — hatep f fiegas. The reading of 25 :41 illustrates the queer
results of a careless conflation. The Rushworth Latin text reads: "in ignem seternum
quern praeparauit pater meus diabulo"; the Lindisfarne Latin text, which is a Vulgate
text resembling Fannan's second original, reads: "in ignem seternum qui praeparatus
est diabolo"; Rushworth^ through a combination of these reads: "in ece fyr pte wses
gel ar wad f seder mjn deofle."

* Thus, for example, E. Matzner, Englische Grammatik (Berlin, 1860), Part I, p. 324;
M. Kaluza, Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache* (Berlin, 1906, 1907), Part II,
p. 169; H. C. Wyld, A Short History of English (New York, 1915), p. 194.

« Thus L. Morsbach, Ueber den Ursprung der neuenglischen Schriftsprache (Heilbronn,
1888), p. 134; H. Sweet, A New English Grammar (Oxford, 1900), Part I, p. 378;
W. Zenke, Synthesis und Analysis des Verbums im Orrmulum (Halle, 1910), p. 32.

462

MIDLAND PRESENT PLURAL INDICATIVE ENDING -e(ri) 127

As more likely sources of this present plural indicative ending in -n,
I wish to suggest the present plural indicative ending in -n belonging
earlier to the preterite-present verbs and to such forms of the sub-
stantive verb as sindon, earon, and bipon. In support of this sugges-
tion I shall present the results of an examination of various Old and
Middle English texts.

As preliminary to a particular examination of the problem, it
will be serviceable, I think, to define the conditions under which
analogical leveling of originally distinct terminations may take place.
Such leveling occurs only where there are very close points of con-
tact, either (a) formal or (b) functional.

Formal contact, or analogy in form, which may result in a level-
ing of originally distinct terminations, exists wherever grammatical
forms belonging to different categories are identical at certain points,
so that the user, unconsciously extending the likeness, makes these
forms identical at other points and thus levels out earlier distinctions.
This kind of analogy has been actively operative in all periods of
English. It produced, for example, the confusion in late West Saxon
between such weak verbs of class I as nerian and weak verbs of
class II — bodian, lufian, etc. ;l in Middle English it was responsible for
the extension of final -e to the nominative singular of originally long-
stemmed feminine nouns, such as lore (OE lar) ; and it is responsible
for such a current neologism as the preterite dove from the infinitive
dive. Examples might be multiplied.

Clearly there were no sufficient points of contact in form between
the present indicative with singular endings (1) u, o, e, (2) es(t),
as(t), (3) ep, op, plural ap, iap, and any of the various mood and tense
forms (present optative, preterite indicative and optative, present
indicative of preterite-presents or the substantive verb) which had
-on, -un, -an, -en, etc., as plural termination. From whatever source
the Midland present plural indicative ending came, the contact
which resulted in the leveling out of the earlier -p in favor of -n could
not have been in form; it must have been in function.

Functional contact, or analogy in function, may obliterate origi-
nal differences in termination through the operation of the natural
tendency to express like relations in like manner. It brought

i Sievers. Ags. Grammatik* (Halle, 1898), sec. 400. Anna. 3.

463

128 V. F. BRYAN

about, for example, the supplantation of the various endings of
the nominative-accusative plural of nouns which were employed in
Old English by the -s ending which belonged earlier only to a
single important class of masculines. It is largely responsible for
the current tendency to obliterate the somewhat nice distinction
between shall and will as auxiliaries of the future and to employ only
will This kind of analogy has been effective in all periods of the
language.

The particular problem of this study is, then, to determine
whether contact in function which would promote analogical leveling
was closest (a) between the plural of the present indicative and of
the present optative, or (6) between the present indicative and the
present optative, plus the preterite indicative and optative, or
(c) between the present plural indicative of normal verbs and the
present plural indicative of preterite-present verbs and the verb
"to be." A priori consideration obviously points to the contact
indicated in (c) as the closest and the most likely to bring about
analogical leveling. The evidence, I think, supports this a priori
presumption.

I shall consider first the likelihood of leveling into the present
indicative from the present optative. Every student of Old English
realizes that the distinction in use between the indicative and the
optative was not always clearly and sharply drawn. Although gener-
ally the use of one mood or the other at any stage of the language
was in accord with fairly well-defined principles, so that one is sure
that a writer felt the distinction between the two moods, yet in
particular instances there appears to have been considerable con-
fusion.1 As a consequence of this lack of a sharply defined boundary

»For example, Matt. 2:13 in the Corpus MS of the West Saxon Gospels reads:
"Toweard ys I> herodes sec8 |> cild to forspillenne," and the reading of the Hatton MS
is similar; in Luke 9:44, however, both Corpus and Hatton have the optative in very
much the same kind of expression, the reading of Corpus being: " Hit is towerd I> mannes
sunu si geseald on manna handa." In this latter passage, both the Rushworth and the
Lindisfarne Glosses have the indicative bid instead of the optative si. Even more striking
an inconsistency appears in Luke 10:22, in which Corpus and Hatton employ both the
indicative and the optative in exactly similar juxtaposed passages. Corpus has: "Nan
man nat hwylc is se sunu buton se faeder ne hwylc si 5e f seder buton se sunu." The leaf
containing this passage is lost from Rushworth, but Lindisfarne has the indicative in both
instances. The Latin text of course has the subjunctive. Many similar instances
might be gleaned passim from A. N. Henshaw's The Syntax of the Indicative and Sub-
junctive Moods in the Anglo-Saxon Gospels (Leipzig, 1894). Inconsistencies in Alfredian

464

MIDLAND PRESENT PLURAL INDICATIVE ENDING -e(n) 129

between the syntax of the indicative and of the optative in some
constructions, or coexistent with this lack, there was a tendency to
transfer to the indicative or to express by the use of the so-called
auxiliary verbs some functions once expressed by the optative.1
Throughout the dialects in the later period of Old English there was
some uncertainty on the part of users of the language as to whether
to employ the indicative or the optative in certain constructions.
To some extent, accordingly, there was a partial confusion in the
use of the two moods; that is, there was some degree of close contact
in function.

But several facts militate strongly against the assumption that,
as a result of this functional contact between the two moods, the end-
ing of the present plural indicative was replaced by that of the present
optative. First, even in texts where apparent confusion of the two
moods exists, so that occasionally an indicative appears instead of
the normal optative, or vice versa, it is quite clear that the writer
felt the distinction between the two, that they were not so confused
as to be used interchangeably. Though in Alfred's prose there are
a number of inconsistencies in mood,2 yet no one would contend
that in these writings the syntactic distinction between optative and
indicative had so far broken down as to favor a breakdown in the
formal distinction and thus make possible the displacement of the
endings of one mood by those of the other. And the situation in
later texts is similar: despite occasional encroachments of one mood

prose are cited in J. E. Wulflng's Die Syntax in den Werken Alfreds des Orossen (Bonn,
1901), Part II, pp. 63-176. The same sort of inconsistency appears in the later entries
of the Peterborough Chronicle. For example, the formula concluding the entry for 1085
reads: " Gebete hit God elmihtiga ponne his willa sy" ; that at the end of the first section
for 113.1 is: "God hit bete pa his wille be{>." Instances might be presented, of course,
from other Middle English texts — as also from Modern English.

1 An illustration of the former is the gradual supplantation of the optative by the
indicative in indirect discourse. See J. H. Gorrell. " Indirect Discourse in Anglo-Saxon,"
in PMLA, X (1895), 342-485. On p. 483 Gorrell declares: " The subjunctive of reported
statements after simple verbs of saying is the rule in early Anglo-Saxon, but chronologi-
cally considered, the use of the subjunctive and of the indicative after such expressions

vary [sic] inversely In the later post-Alfredian period, the great leveling

of moods under the indicative tended to limit the use of the subjunctive after verbs of
saying to expressions of possibility, contingency, condition, etc." A not wholly satis-
factory presentation of the growth of the use of auxiliaries to supplant the optative
may be found passim in Gerald Hotz's On the Use of the Subjunctive Mood in Anglo-Saxon
and Its Further History in Old English (Zurich, 1882).

2 See Wulflng, op. cit., especially p. 147.

465

130 W. F. BRYAN

upon what was, or had been, the field of the other, the distinction
between the two was unquestionably felt. Second, in Middle English
texts of all dialects the distinction between present indicative and
present optative is clearly preserved. Even in the East Midland
dialect, where the present indicative plural had adopted the ending
-e(ri) and accordingly had come to have the same form as the present
optative plural, the distinction in form was preserved in the singular.1
It is hardly possible to conceive of any confusion of function that
affected only the plural form and left the singular untouched. In the
Northern and the Southern dialects the syntactic difference between
indicative and optative continued to be marked, in the plural as
well as in the singular, by distinct terminations. Finally, as is well
known, what tendency there has been in English toward leveling
out the distinction between optative and indicative has at all times
been generally toward supplanting the former by the latter.2 It is
of course possible that a single instance should contravene a general
tendency, but unless such a contravention of normal development
is shown to have been especially favored by circumstances it can
hardly be assumed as probable. It appears to me, then, that
although there was some degree of functional contact between
indicative and optative, yet the evidence discredits the theory that
as a result of this contact alone the present plural indicative ending
in -p actually was displaced by that of the optative in -n. The con-
tact between the moods may have been a factor in the development
of this -n ending in the indicative, but it can hardly have been the
chief cause.

The theory that the ending in question was extended from the
present optative, plus the preterite indicative and optative, is sup-
ported by whatever argument there is for extension from the present
optative alone and, in addition, by a plausible assumption. After
the lightly stressed vowels of the personal endings had weakened in
character and had thus become indistinguishable in speech, the plural
endings of the present optative, the preterite indicative, and the

* In the very earliest Midland material, that in the Peterborough Chronicle, the
present optative singular ending -e is kept altogether distinct from the indicative endings
-eat, ~ep (ap, op). See the forms cited by Meyer, pp. 79-84, 99. 103-5.

2 The one important exception to this general tendency is in the use of the optative
instead of the indicative in the protasis of a simple condition. See Hotz, op. cit., pp. 47 ff.

466

MIDLAND PRESENT PLURAL INDICATIVE ENDING -e(rc) 131

preterite optative all fell together. The assumption is that when
these three plural forms of the verb came to be indicated indistin-
guishably by -n preceded by a colorless vowel, this -n termination
became felt as the generic plural sign and displaced the earlier present
plural indicative ending in -p. Such a displacement is much like
that whereby in other instances originally distinct terminations
have later been leveled out — for example, in nouns the supplanta-
tion of various nominative-accusative plural endings by that in -s,
which belonged earlier only to masculine a-stems. This theory of
the introduction of the -n ending into the present plural indicative,
supported as it is by the analogy of similar levelings, appears very
plausible, and on a priori consideration seems an adequate and satis-
factory explanation. But it is merely an assumption for which
there is no direct evidence; there is no actual interchange in Old
English texts of -op, -on, -en which would prove the existence of a
linguistic feeling for a common plural termination in these different
moods and tenses.

My own belief, as already stated, is that this present plural
indicative ending traces back much more directly to the present
plural indicative ending of preterite-present verbs and of certain
forms of the verb "to be" (earon, sindon, bipori) than it does to
the sources hitherto suggested. I shall consider first the preterite-
present verbs.

It is obvious, I think, that a closer functional contact existed
between the present indicative of normal verbs and the same mood
and tense of preterite-present verbs than between present indicative
and present optative of normal verbs, or than between present
indicative and a combination of present optative and preterite
indicative and optative. Many of the preterite-present verbs which
were most frequently used and which were therefore most apt starting
points for analogical levelings were used, not primarily as auxiliaries,
but exactly as normal verbs. It is almost inconceivable that witan
("know"), cunnan ("know, be acquainted with"), agan ("possess"),
unnan ("grant"), munan ("remember") should have been kept
strongly distinguished in form from normal verbs whose function
was identical with their own. From this functional identity, a con-
fusion in form and a later leveling were most likely.

467

132 ' W. F, BRYAN

Evidence of the confusion in form from which a later leveling
may be assumed appears in a number of Old English texts in various
dialects. In West Saxon, where the conservative influence of a
cultivated and literary Schriftsprache was strongest, this confusion was
least apparent,^et its occurrence in this dialect is clear. Sievers
notes in late West Saxon for the preterite-present gemunan a complete
set of present indicative forms taken over from the normal verb.1
In JElfric's rendering of some of the Old Testament the preterite-
present dgan also has forms belonging properly to the normal verb.2
Undoubtedly a search of other late West Saxon texts would show a
number of similar forms in other preterite-present verbs. In the
Mercian and Northumbrian dialects, where the language was less
protected from natural tendencies, the evidences of confusion are
much more impressive. In Rushworth1 s cunnan in the present plural
indicative ends five times in -un, -an, and three times in -p\ and the
only present indicative singular of gemunan is gemynest, with the
ending of a normal verb. In the Lindisfarne Gloss to the Gospels,*
out of a total of fifty-five present indicative plurals of wuta there are
ten forms with the ending -s or -ft; cunna in six occurrences has one
form in -s; the only present indicative plurals of ftor/a are two forms
in -ft,5 and the only singular has also adopted the ending -ft from
normal verbs; and mono, in the only occurrences has one singular
and one plural in -s. In Rushworth2, the Northumbrian portion of
the Rushworth Gloss to the Gospels,6 wuta has six forms in -s or -ft out
of a total of forty-four present plural indicatives, and gemuna, in its
only occurrences in the present indicative, has one singular in -ft and
one plural in -s.

The same sort of contamination appears in Middle English texts
of the South, as the following examples from early documents show.
The Poema Morale in the Jesus MS has schullep in lines 103 and 264;

» Ag8. Gram., ed. 3, sec. 423, 9. Anm. 2.

2 Deuteronomy 4:22, ge agad; 5:33, a first person singular present indicative age.
See C. Brtthl, Die Flexion des Verbums in &lfrics Heptateuch und Buck Hiob (Marburg,
1892), pp. 90-92.

8 See Brown, Part II, sec. 52.

4 See Theodor Kolbe, "Die Konjugation der Lindisfarner Evangelien," Banner
Studien zur englischen Philologie (Bonn, 1912), V, 95 flf.

5 Except one durfu we, as to which see Sievers, Ags. Gram., sec. 360, 2, Anm. 3.

6 See Lindelof s Die Siidnorthumbrische Mundart, pp. 149 ff.

468

MIDLAND PRESENT PLURAL INDICATIVE ENDING -e(n) 133

versions E and e in the Egerton MS have witep in line 290, and E also
has sculled in line 284.1 The A-version of La^amon's Brut has a
second person singular agest, a plural agcefi, and a large num-
ber of plurals in -efi(ed) of Old English sculan. The B-version has
a second person singular canest, a plural witep, several plurals ogep,
owep, and five plurals in -ep of Old English sculan.2 In The Owl
and the Nightingale both manuscripts have witest as well as wost, and
the Jesus MS has a plural nutep of this verb and two instances of the
plural schullep* A later text, the so-called Robert of Gloucester's
Chronicle, has a plural mowep, eight plurals ssolep (ssullep), and six
witep (nutep , nytep)* Examples of preterite-present verbs with the
endings of normal verbs might be multiplied from Southern Middle
English documents.

The forms cited above from Old and Middle English documents
show the transfer of endings from normal verbs to preterite-present
verbs; that is, they clearly show a tendency to level out the personal
endings of one class in favor of the other. In the forms cited, the
tendency was toward supplanting the endings of preterite-present
by those of normal verbs; in earlier stages of Old English, however,
in all dialects as well as in other Germanic dialects, at one point the
ending of the preterite-presents largely displaced that of normal
verbs — in the second person singular present indicative, where -st
supplanted -s. Though the addition of -t here was probably due in
part to enclisis of the pronoun subject, there is no question as to the
determining influence of the analogy of the preterite-presents.5

It is clear, then, that the relationship between preterite-presents
and normal verbs was extremely close — so close that personal endings
belonging properly to one class actually, in particular instances,

1 For bibliographical data see Zupitza-Schipper, Alt- und mittelenglische* Ubungsbuch11
(Vienna and Leipzig, 1915), p. 86.

*See Max BOhnke, Die Flexion dea Verbums in La^amons Brut (Berlin, 1906),
pp. 74 ff.

« See J. E. Wells, "Accidence in 'The Owl and the Nightingale'," Anglia. XXXIII,
268-69.

«See P. Pabst, " Flexionsverhaltnisse bei Robert von Gloucester," Anglia, XIII,
236-38.

6 See Sievers, Ags. Gram., ed. 3, sec. 356, and Anm. 1, for the situation in Old English.
For the process of displacement see Joseph and Mary Elizabeth Wright, Old English
Grammar (Oxford, 1908), p. 240; W. Braune, Althochdeuttche Grammatik (Halle, 1911),
3d and 4th eds., sec. 306. b. Anm. 5: and F. Kluge, Vorgeachichte der altgermanitchen
Dialekte (Strassburg, 1913), 3ded., p. 163.

469

134 ' W. F. BRYAN

were transferred to the other. This leveling, too, was not always
in favor of the endings proper to the more numerous normal verbs;
actually, in the second person singular of the present indicative in
all dialects, a preterite-present ending to a very considerable extent
displaced the ending of normal verbs. Exactly similar to this latter
development would be the displacement of the normal present plural
indicative ending in -p by that of the preterite-present in -n.

The present plural ending of the preterite-presents also exerted
a strong leveling influence upon the form of the substantive verb.
The present plural sindon -un (originally of the third person only),
which appears not only in all dialects of Old English but in Old High
German and Old Saxon as well, owes its added -on, -un to the analogy
of the preterite-present verbs.1 In the Anglian dialects, Mercian and
Northumbrian, this ending extended its scope very greatly. In the
Vespasian Psalter and Hymns, Mercian texts from the first half of
the ninth century, sind (sin) occurs 133 times as against a total of
24 forms in -un, -on (18 sindun -on, 6 earuri).2 In Rushworth1, a pre-
dominantly Mercian text about a hundred years later, the proportion
of forms with the extended ending is reversed as compared with the
earlier text: Rushworth1 has 59 sindun -on and only 6 sint, and it also
has a single arun. Further, in Rushworth1 this ending has been ex-
tended from the stem *es, to which it was first attached, and has made
its way into the stem *bheu: by the side of 26 beop (biop) are 7 beopan
and 1 bifton* The other late Mercian material has altogether only
three occurrences of "to be"— in the Life of St. Chad one beofi (1. 223)
and one earun (1. 244), in the Royal Glosses a single sind. These single
instances constitute very little evidence of any value. Northum-
brian texts of approximately the same date as Rushworth1 4 show a
similar extension of the -n ending. In the gloss to the Durham Ritual,

1 Wright's Old English Grammar, p. 277, is misleadingly brief in presenting "sindon
-un with the ending of the pret. pi. added on." O. Behagel, Geschichte der deutschen
Sprache* (Strassburg, 1911), p. 276, states more exactly: "Fiir die 3. Pers. PL bestand
die Nebenform sindun, in Angle! chung an die Praterito-Prasentia, die 1. u. 2. Pers. PL
schon nahe standen." See also W. Wilmans, Deutsche Grammatik (Strassburg, 1906),
3te Abt., 1. Halfte, sec. 28, 3; and W. Streitberg, Urgermanische Grammatik (Heidelberg,
1896), p. 318.

'The occurrences are listed in C. Grimm's "Glossar zum Vespasian-Psalter und
den Hymnen," Anglistische Forschungen (Heidelberg, 1906), XVIII, 55.

» See Brown, op. cit.t Part II, pp. 68-69.

* See Bttlbring, Ae. Elementarbuch. sees. 24-25.

470

MIDLAND PRESENT PLURAL INDICATIVE ENDING -e(ri) 135

sind (sint) occurs only 5 times to 21 sindon, and there are also 7 aro (n).
To the stem *bheu there are 29 bi<So(ri) and not a single plural with the
normal, unextended ending in -/>(#). * In the Lindisfarne Gloss to
the Gospels, the proportion of sind to sindon forms is much higher
than in any other late Anglian text, the numbers being 29 sindon to
168 sind. But this text shows 94 aron(aru), and a complete displace-
ment of the normal present plural indicative of the stem *bheu by a
form with the ending -on that traces back ultimately to preterite-
present verbs. The figures are 200 bidon (bifio, biodori), 2 biad, 2
bifi(d). In all probability the two bid (8) are properly singular forms;
the two biafi show extension of the ending of normal verbs into the
substantive verb, as does a singular biefi. This text also has a second
person singular arst, through the analogy of the preterite-presents.2
In Rushworth2, sindon again greatly outnumbers sint, the figures
being 77 sindon to 28 sint. There are also 35 aron (aruri). In this
text, too, the normal plural of *bheu has been completely displaced
by forms with added -on, -un; there are 85 biofion (un, o) and only 3
bidd* and these three biafi are due to the analogy of normal verbs,
as in Lindisfarne above. Thus, by the end of the tenth century, in
both the Anglian dialects the various stems of the verb "to be" gen-
erally had come to have the present plural indicative end in -on,
-un, an ending derived ultimately or immediately from the preterite-
present group of verbs.

The situation existing in these dialects, as shown in the preceding
paragraphs, was most favorable to the further extension of this -n
ending into the present plural indicative of normal verbs. In the
first place, this ending had so far extended its use from the preterite-
presents into the substantive verb as to be characteristic of both these
important verb classes. Verb forms of these classes were in most
frequent and general use, and had close functional contact with nor-
mal verbs; on both accounts, therefore, they were apt starting-points
for an analogical leveling. Either the group of preterite-presents
alone or the substantive verb alone could exert a strong influence
upon the form of other verbs; the analogy of both in combination

1 See Uno Lindelof, " WQrterbuch zur Interlinearglosse des Rituale Ecclesiae Dunel-
mensis," Banner Beitrdge (Bonn, 1901), IX, 231, under vosa.

2 See Kolbe's Konjugation, pp. 100-102.

» See Lindelof, S&dnorthumbrische Mundart, p. 150.

471

136 'W. F. BRYAN

multiplied this influence. In the second place, this -n ending was
showing very great vigor — it had developed in use far beyond its
original scope and was apparently in the active stage of further
extension. Under these circumstances, if there were no powerful
contrary tendencies, the displacement of the plural in -p, which be-
longed to normal verbs, by that in -n, which was common to both
the substantive verb and the preterite-presents, was a natural step,
in full accord with usual linguistic process. In Mercian (Midland),
so far as I have observed, there were no strong opposing tendencies;
on the contrary, the displacement was favored by whatever func-
tional contact there was between present indicative and present
optative, and by whatever tendency may have existed toward the
development of a general plural termination through the extension
of the ending -n from the present optative and the preterite indicative
and optative into the present indicative.1

In Northumbrian (Northern), however, a similar extension of
-n into the present plural indicative did encounter a very strong
opposing tendency — that toward the generalization of -s as the ending
of all persons of the present indicative, plural as well as singular. In
the Durham Ritual2 the earlier endings in -p were still more numerous
in the third person singular and in the plural than were endings in -s.
In Rushworth2 and Lindisfarne? though -p was used more often in the
third person singular, -s was considerably more frequent in the plural.
In all three of these texts -p appeared occasionally in the second
person singular, but in none of them had -s or -p made its way into
the first person singular. So vigorous, however, was this -s termina-
tion that in Middle English texts of the Northern dialect it had
supplanted all other personal endings of the present indicative
(except when the verb was in immediate contact with a personal
pronoun subject), and thus had become the characteristic present
indicative ending in both numbers and all persons. It had even
established itself in the stem *bheut both singular and plural. The
extraordinary vigor of this ending forestalled the extension of the -n
termination in the Northern dialect.

> See above, pp. 464-67.

» See Uno LindelOf, Die Sprache des Rituals von Durham (Helsingfors, 1890), pp. 72 ff.

« See LindelOf, Sudnorthumbrische Mundart. pp. 128 ff., and Kolbe, Konjugation,
pp. 107 ff.

472

MIDLAND PRESENT PLURAL INDICATIVE ENDING -e(n) 137

In the Southern dialect the present plural indicative ending in
-p remained in normal verbs throughout the Middle English period.
The retention of this ending in Southern, as contrasted with its dis-
placement in Northern and Midland, is to be explained in great part,
I think, by the power of the analogy of the substantive verb. In
late West Saxon texts the ending -on, -un was not extended to the
substantive verb so greatly as it was in Mercian and Northumbrian :
ear on was not used in the South; sind appears to have been fully as
common as sindon;1 and -on, -un was never attached to *bheu, the
present plural of this stem remaining beop. The form beop had much
greater vitality than sind (on), and during the transition period com-
pletely displaced the latter, which disappeared from Southern texts.2
The analogy of this plural beop must have operated powerfully to
strengthen and preserve the plural in -p of normal verbs.3 The
situation was precisely the reverse of that in the Midland dialect,
where through the extension of the -n termination to the substantive
verb the influence of the preterite-presents toward the analogical
displacement of -p by -n was enormously reinforced.

W. F. BRYAN

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

» The distribution of sind and sindon in late West Saxon tests is peculiar. In the
Blickling Homilies (ed. R. Morris, E.E.T.S., Nos. 58, 63. 73), syndon and synt occur with
approximately equal frequency. In the Gospel of Nichodemus (ed. W. H. Hulme,
PM LA, XIII, 457 ff.), the Cotton MS has only syndon, and the single synd of the Cam-
bridge MS is probably a scribal error. In the West Saxon Gospels (ed. J. W. Bright,
Boston, 1904, 1905, 1906) I have gone over the first eight chapters of Matthew, Mark,
and John, and found in Matthew 21 synt (synd), in Mark 25, and in John 22; I found no
syndon in these chapters.

2 See Karl Jost, "Beon und Wesan; eine syntaktische Untersuchung," Anglistische
Forschungen (Heidelberg, 1909), XXVI, HOff. Jost shows, for example, that in a copy
of one of ^Elfric's homilies, the frequently occurring sind (on) of the original has been
replaced in every instance by beop. In the A- version of Lajamon's Brut, by the side of
usual bead are some instances of sunden; in the B-version, in all the nine instances where
the text corresponds with that of A, sunden has been given up in favor of beod.

3 One may, of course, assume — contrary to the opinion expressed above — that
sind (on) was given up and beop preserved through the influence of normal verbs with
present plural ending in -P. This assumption seems to me altogether unlikely. If
sind (on) had been in vigorous current use, the analogy of normal verbs would have oper-
ated not to displace sind (on) entirely, but to attach to it the plural ending of normal
verbs (ap, ej>), as was actually the case in La^amon A22153 and 24766 (sunded), and
27319 (seonded). The fact that sind (on) wholly disappeared from Southern texts even
of the early Middle English period shows very positively, I think, that it had previously
fallen out of use, so that in the South only beop remained in currency.

473

THE ARRANGEMENT AND DATES OF MILTON'S

SONNETS

Professor David Harrison Stevens, in a recent article entitled
"The Order of Milton's Sonnets, m has worked out a new chronology
for these pieces based primarily on the hypothesis that Milton him-
self intended to arrange them according to the time of their composi-
tion and that their order in the 1645 edition and their designated
order in the Cambridge Manuscript may therefore be relied on
for the determination of doubtful points. Proved disagreement
between the Cambridge Manuscript and the edition of 1673 is held
to strengthen the supposition that the departures from the chrono-
logical order in that volume did not have Milton's sanction.

In reopening the question of chronology and in directing atten-
tion to the data afforded by the Cambridge Manuscript, Professor
Stevens has rendered a necessary service to Milton scholarship. A
review of his conclusions is made desirable by what appears to be
unsoundness in some of his arguments and by the existence of
evidence in addition to what has hitherto been brought forward.
We may consider first the problem of the arrangement of the sonnets
in the 1673 edition.

The poems chiefly in question are the two divorce sonnets — XI,
"A book was writ of late called Tetrachordon," and XII, "I did but
prompt the age to quit their clogs" — and the poem "On the New
Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament." Sonnets XI and
XII stand in that order and numbering in the 1673 edition. In the
manuscript, however, they occur in the inverse order and numbering
both in the drafts in Milton's hand and in an amanuensis copy.
Stevens is in agreement with Masson and is undoubtedly right in
dating Sonnet XII (11) before Sonnet XI (12), but the explanation
of the change in the 1673 edition isrstill wanting. The "Forcers of
Conscience" stands without number after the sonnet to Vane on

» Modern Philology, XVII (1919), 25-33.

475] 139

[ MODERN PHILOLOGY, January, 1921

140 JAMES HOLLY HANFOBD

folio [48] l of the manuscript in the hand of an amanuensis. There
is, however, a notation in Milton's hand between his own transcript
of Sonnet XI (12) and the sonnet to Fairfax on folio 47, "on ye
forcers of Conscience to come in heer," followed by "turn over the
leafe" in the hand of the scribe who copied the poem, while on
folio [48] there is the deleted notation beside the title of the piece
and in the same hand: "to come in as directed on the leafe before."
In the 1673 edition the poem stands after the sonnet series and
separated from it by the translation from Horace and the "Vacation
Exercise" (7 pages). What are we to infer to have been Milton's
intention regarding its position ?

It would seem probable that Milton had been of two minds
about the poem, whether to regard it as a sonnet and place it with
the two divorce pieces to which it is related in subject-matter and
tone, or, because of its difference in form, to separate it entirely from
the series. This would account for his having omitted to record it
earlier in the Cambridge Manuscript2 and for his having left it
unnumbered. The fact that the notation on folio [48] is canceled
and that the piece stands apart from the series in the 1673 edition
might be supposed to indicate that Milton returned in the end to
his first intention, the scribe having simply omitted to cross out the
notation on folio 47. To prove conclusively that in preparing the
material for the press Milton separated the "Forcers of Conscience"
from the divorce sonnets and to gain further light on the poet's
plans for a second edition of his minor verse we have to consider a
set of facts about the Cambridge Manuscript of which Professor
Stevens has made only partial use.

It has long been recognized that two sheets of the manuscript,
folios 45-[46] (which should be reversed) and folios 49-[50], originally
belonged to a separate set of papers. They are shorter than the
rest and are said to be of different manufacture. The first of these,

1 Following Stevens' practice I have numbered the MS pages according to the num-
bers on the alternate pages of the document itself and not according to Wright's facsimile.
The correct numbers for unnumbered folios appear in brackets. In the case of the
sonnets, roman numerals give the numbering in the 1673 edition, Arabic that in the
Cambridge MS.

2 Whatever the date of the poem (see below) it cannot be later than the Vane sonnet.
That the poem was hi existence when Milton still had the use of his eyes is proved by
the notation in his hand on folio 47.

476

ARRANGEMENT AND DATES OF MILTON'S SONNETS 141

headed "these sonnets follow ye 10 in ye printed booke," contains
(folio [46]) copies of Sonnets XII1 and XI (numbered 11, 12) in the
hand of one amanuensis, A, and (folio 45) Sonnets XIII and XIV
(13, 14) in the same hand; the second contains (folio 49) the last
ten lines of Sonnet XVIII, "Cyriack whose grandsire," and the
whole of "Cyriack this three years day" (numbered 22) in a second
scribal hand, B, also (folio [50]) Sonnet XIX, "Methought I saw"
(numbered 23), in still a third hand, C. Besides the folio numbers
in the upper right-hand corner, which designate the position of these
papers in the Cambridge volume and are not in Milton's hand,
folio [46] has in the left margin the number 1 (scribe A?), and
folio 49 in a corresponding position the number 7 (scribe B). Evi-
dently we have here two fragments of a transcript of the sonnets
with two full leaves (4 pages, folios [3-6]) missing between them.
Now the sonnets on folios [46]^45 (1 and [2] of the transcript) are
copies of poems already in the long-leaf portion of the manuscript
in Milton's hand, while those on folios 49-[50] (7-[8]) are found
only here. Furthermore, scribe A has made extensive corrections
in the original drafts of the sonnets (folios 43-[44], and 47-[48]),
including those to Cromwell and Vane and the poem on the Forcers
of Conscience, which are missing from the preserved folios of the
transcript. Apparently Milton had directed him to prepare the
whole group as it stands in the long-leaf portion of the manuscript
for the press and to copy out the material in order as numbered,
i.e., the four sonnets on folio [46]-45, and also Fairfax, 15, Cromwell,
16, Vane, 17, and the "Forcers of Conscience," without number at
the end. It is reasonable to suppose that this process took place
between 1652, the date of the Cromwell and Vane sonnets, and 1655,
the date of the two Cyriack Skinner sonnets, for we find no traces
of scribe A's hand on folios 49-[50].2

1 The roman numerals refer to the numbering in the 1673 edition, from which the
Fairfax, Cromwell, and Vane sonnets and the second sonnet to Skinner were omitted
for political reasons.

2 More precisely, a date in the fall or winter of 1653-54 is suggested by the known
details of Milton's biography. Milton had been in large measure relieved of the duties
of the secretaryship in December, 1652, and Masson (IV, 519 flf.) shows that he must
have enjoyed considerable leisure for over a year, only four of his state letters falling
between February, 1653, and June, 1654. The Second Defense was probably not under-
taken before 1654 (published in May). The resumption of the more or less mechanical
work of translating the Psalms, finished in August, 1653, and the determination to

477

142 JAME& HOLLY HANFORD

Assuming for the moment that the "Forcers of Conscience" was
actually included in the transcript (Professor Stevens thinks it was
not), we have a reconstruction of the document as it stood by 1655.
It seems likely that Milton, feeling that he cared to, or was to,
write no more minor poems, was projecting a second edition, to
include all the work which he had written up to that time. The
Piedmont massacre, however, in April, 1655, brought a second and
greater inspiration to the sonnet form. Five poems, Piedmont [18],1
"When I consider" [19], l Lawrence [20], l "Cyriack whose grandsire"
[21],1 and "Cyriack, this three years day," 22, were composed in
that year, and the sixth, "Methought I saw," 23, after the death of
his second wife in 1658. These sonnets were, we may assume,
written in the transcript by various scribes, as they were composed.2
For confirmation of this account of the contents of the transcript,
and particularly of the conjecture that the "Forcers of Conscience,"
unnumbered, was included in it, we have only to calculate the space
left for the missing material on pages [4-6]. The preserved pages
contain two sonnets each (a little less in the hand of scribe B).
Counting the "Forcers of Conscience" (20 lines) with the first
four lines of "Cyriack whose grandsire" (which must have stood at
the bottom of page 6) as the equivalent of nearly two sonnets, we
have a perfect fit.

It should now be clear that Milton himself determined the
position of the "Forcers of Conscience," out of chronological order,
after the sonnet series, where it stands in the edition of 1673. We
may next inquire whether the reversal of the divorce sonnets may not
also have been made under his direction. A possible reason for the
change is at once apparent in the fact that Sonnet XI (12), naming
the Tetrachordon, comes appropriately first, since the reader would
find the bearing of Sonnet XII (11) unintelligible without it, unless

issue a second edition of his poems may be connected with these facts and with his
blindness. I assume that he would have wished to finish the versions for inclusion in
the edition. The notation vide ante, opposite the page number on folio 1 of the tran-
script, may refer to the copy containing them, which has not been preserved.

1 The order is that of the 1673 edition, where these three sonnets are numbered
XV, XVI, and XVII.

* Not much later certainly, for we know from other dated documents in his hand
that scribe C was working for Milton about 1658-60. See Hanford, "The Date
Milton's De Doctrina Christiana," Studies in Philology, June, 1920.

478

ARRANGEMENT AND DATES OF MILTON'S SONNETS 143

indeed the original title, "On the Detraction which followed upon
my writing certain Treatises," had been retained. It is retained in
the transcript, where, it will be remembered, the sonnets stand in
their original order and numbering. But it had not been Milton's
earlier intention to preserve it. It is deleted in the first draft,
though the cancellation is so inconspicuously made (an "x" through
the single word "detraction") that it would be easy for the scribe
to overlook it. This I assume that he did; but before the edition
had issued from the press (presumably during the preparation of a
second press transcript)1 the error was corrected by a return to
Milton's original intention. The change in the order of the sonnets
followed as a natural consequence and even so it was found neces-
sary to connect Sonnet XII with Sonnet XI by the caption "On the
same." This certainly looks like the author's work.

In view of the evidence that Milton rearranged his sonnets in
preparing them for the press it now becomes necessary to set aside
the assumption that their designated order in the press transcript
(with the corresponding scribal numbering of Milton's originals) can
be trusted for purposes of chronology. That Sonnet XII (11) was
written earlier than Sonnet XI (12) is, as I have remarked, reasonably
certain on other grounds. But is it certain that they were written
consecutively or that they both antedate the sonnets which follow
them in the edition ? Milton would in any case have wished them
to stand together, and because of their difference in tone from the
others he would have found it natural to place them either at the
beginning or end of the later series. As a matter of fact the evidence
of their original positions in Milton's portion of the Cambridge
Manuscript is strongly against the conclusion that they belong
together chronologically. Sonnet XII (11) follows the two drafts
of the Lawes sonnet on folio 43 of the manuscript; Sonnet XI (12)
is at the top of folio 45, the intervening page being partly occupied

ilt seems probable that such a transcript existed. The corrections in the first
transcript, particularly in Sonnet 22, and the necessity of adjusting the position of the
"Forcers of Conscience" and of incorporating new material would have made a new
copy desirable. Moreover, the fact that the two fragments of the first press transcript
remained in Milton's hands would seem to indicate that this is not the document which
was actually submitted to the printer. Whether Milton himself supervised the printing
of the edition and what unauthorized changes, if any, were made by the printer remain
open questions.

479

144 JAMBS HOLLY HANFORD

with the two drafts of the sonnet on Mrs. Thompson. If the two
divorce sonnets were written consecutively before the sonnet to
Lawes, as Professor Stevens assumes, Milton's drafts must both
be copies of earlier originals, for the Lawes and Mrs. Thompson
sonnets are pretty evidently first working drafts. We may admit
that Milton may for some reason have reserved the two divorce
sonnets apart and later decided to copy them in with the rest, but
then it is hard to see why, in so doing, he should have failed to
place Sonnet XI (12) at the top of folio [44], or, supposing the copying
to have been done after the writing of the sonnet on Mrs. Thompson,
in the blank space at the bottom of folio [44], which corresponds in
size to that in which the draft of Sonnet XI (12) was written on
folio 43.1 Equally suspicious is the fact that the drafts of the two
divorce sonnets were not, apparently, written with the same pen.
It seems more likely, on the showing of the manuscript, that both
Sonnets XII and XI are first drafts and occur in the manuscript in
their chronological relation to the Lawes and Mrs. Thompson son-
nets, or that Sonnet XII (11) is a copy and Sonnet XI (12) a first
draft, some support for the second alternative being given by the
appearance of the writing and the character of the emendations, as
well as by the fact that Sonnet XII (11) does not begin a page.2

Obviously such inferences are not reliable enough to stand in the
face of unequivocal evidence of other kinds, but there is no such
evidence. Stevens dates Sonnet XII (11) in the fall of 1644 on the
ground that it shows a spirit of active conflict such as would have
possessed Milton during the first heat of resentment against the
"barbarous noise" of his detractors. It may, however, be read as
an expression of deepening realization of the character of the Pres-
byterian tyranny, rather than as a mere outburst of personal anger,
and a date soon after the Lawes sonnet, Feb. 9, 1645 (i.e., 1646),

1 The two spaces measure almost exactly the same. Sonnet XI (12) being without
title would have taken up less room than Sonnet XII (11).

2 In the draft of Sonnet XII (11) one whole line is re-written, with the same pen as
the original. The writing is even and there are no other alterations. In Sonnet XI (12)
Milton has evidently hesitated long over^the epithet in the line, "These rugged names,"
etc. He at first wrote "barbarous," then "rough-hewn," repeating the latter in the
margin, and finally "rugged." The text of the poem by no means satisfied him even
so, for he later instructed scribe A to make extensive alterations. All this points to
the fact that the draft was set down while the poem was still in process of composition.

480

ARRANGEMENT AND DATES OF MILTON'S SONNETS 145

is not at all impossible. This would, at least, have the advantage
of explaining why the poem was not included in the edition of 1645;
some weight, also, may be attached to its similarity in theme and
tone with the "Forcers of Conscience" (1646, see below). The
Tetrachordon sonnet, following as it does the sonnet to Mrs. Thomp-
son, whose death occurred December, 1646, would, if the chronology
suggested by the Cambridge Manuscript is adopted, have to be
assigned to the year 1647 or later. This would perhaps better fit
the rather whimsical tone of the poem and Milton's statement that
the Tetrachordon, published March, 1645, had "walked the town a
while" before it was forgotten, than Stevens' date, the summer of
1645. I dissent vigorously from the opinion that Mistress Milton's
return to London in August or September would terminate her
husband's interest in the fate of his last pamphlets or in the question
of divorce!1

In the case of the "Forcers of Conscience" I agree with Profes-
sor Stevens that Masson's date, the first months of 1646, based on
the references in the poem to the attacks of Baillie and Edwards, is
too early. It is a part of the conspiracy to interpret everything in
Milton's poetry in narrowly personal terms. Stevens' ascription of
the piece to the beginning of the year 1647 is much more reasonable,
but the assumption that Milton's notation on folio 47 fixes its
position after the sonnet to Mrs. Thompson, in or later than Decem-
ber, 1646, is obviously unsound. The note indicates only that the
poem was to follow Sonnet XI (12), not that it was to come between
XIV and XV, and even so it tells us nothing of its chronological
position. It is perhaps more likely that the poem was written
immediately after the passage of the ordinance of August 28, 1646,
though it may have been composed just before this final realization
of the "just fears" of Milton and the Independents. The whole
matter is conjectural, but I feel that the chronological sequence —
Sonnet XII (11) (1645-46); the "Forcers of Conscience" (summer
[?] of 1646); Sonnet XIV (December, 1646); and Sonnet XI (12)
( 1647-48) 2 — is the best that we can do on the available evidence.

1 The continuation of Milton's interest in the subject of divorce is evident from
the chapters devoted to it in the Christian Doctrine. But the poem is not strictly speaking
a "divorce sonnet."

2 I.e., before the Fairfax sonnet.

481

146 JAMES, HOLLY HANFOBD

The doubtful points in the chronology of the sonnet group pub-
lished in the 1645 edition concern the date of the poem " To a Nightin-
gale" (Sonnet I) and of the Italian pieces (Sonnets II-VI with the
Canzone). The first of these is placed by Masson in the Horton
period; the others have been assumed to be products of Milton's
Italian journey (1638-39). These dates have, however, been
challenged and Professor Stevens suggests that the position of
Sonnets I-VI before Sonnet VII, "How Soon Hath Time" (1631),
strengthens the opinion that they were written at Cambridge as
literary exercises in the fashion of the day. Now, the general propo-
sition that the order in which Milton chose to arrange his sonnets
constitutes a trustworthy guide to their chronology is, as we have
seen, a doubtful one. He did not in the 1645 edition hesitate to
modify the chronological order of the other poems when there was
good reason to do so. Thus he naturally preferred to begin the
volume with the great "Nativity Ode" (1629) rather than with
the juvenile paraphrases of the Psalms. And in arranging the Latin
elegies he placed Elegy VII at the end of the series though it had
been written earlier than Elegy VI. None the less Professor Stevens
is undoubtedly right in his conclusion that Milton attached con-
siderable importance to the time of life at which his poems were
written, and desired, other considerations being indifferent, to have
the arrangement indicate a progression corresponding to his years.
The sonnet "On Arriving at the Age of Twenty Three" constitutes
a dividing point in his career and the placing of Sonnets I-VI before
it may be significant. Unfortunately for the certainty of our con-
clusions there were also artistic reasons for such an arrangement,
for Sonnet I constitutes a fitting introduction to the Italian poems
and the whole group is sharply distinguished from the later poems
in subject-matter and tone. We are forced, therefore, in our attempt
to reach a decision as to their date to rely primarily on other kinds
of evidence. Such evidence exists in certain biographical sugges-
tions, hitherto overlooked, which seem to unite this group very
closely with the Latin elegies addressed to Diodati. In Elegy I
(1625-26) Milton says that Cupid has as yet granted him immunity
from love. In Elegy VII (1627) he declares that the blind boy has
stricken him with the beauty of a nameless maiden in revenge for

482

ARRANGEMENT AND DATES OF MILTON'S SONNETS 147

his earlier scorn. In Sonnet I (the first lines of which are translated
from vss. 25-26 of Elegy V, 1629) he avows himself servant of the
Muse and Love and prays for success. In Sonnet IV he writes, in
language which closely parallels the opening of Elegy VII:

Diodati (e te '1 dir6 con maraviglia)
Quel ritroso io, ch'amor spreggiar solea
E de' suoi lacci spesso mi ridea,
Gia caddi, ov' uom dabben talor s'impiglia.1

Finally, in the envoy to Elegy VII, written at some later time, he
declares that he has been freed by philosophy from his youthful
errors and is henceforth proof against the tyranny of love, while in
Elegy VI (written at the Christmas season of the year 1629) he
seems to imply that he has bidden or is about to bid farewell to
amatory themes.

In these utterances we seem to have playful but coherent record,
expressed in a leash of languages for the edification of his friend, of
a well-defined phase of the young poet's experience. It seems
unlikely that the light game would ever have been renewed. With
the composition of the "Nativity Ode," about Christmas, 1629,
Milton's poetry, in accordance with the intention implied in Elegy
VI, takes on a decidedly higher and more serious tone. The pieces
in Latin and English which we know to have been composed in
Italy or at Horton are entirely untouched by the Petrarchan mood.
That Milton should be found writing to Diodati in 1638-39 in the
strain which he had used a whole decade earlier is well-nigh incredible.
In the absence of evidence to the contrary, therefore, I should date
Sonnets I-VI between Elegies VII and VI, i.e., in 1628-29, cer-
tainly not later than the sonnet "On Arriving at the Age of Twenty

Three."

JAMES HOLLY HANFORD
UNIVERSITY OP NORTH CAROLINA

i " Saepe cupidineas, puerilia tela, sagittas,
Atque tuum sprevi, maxime numen, Amor."

483

ALFRED TENNYSON AS A CELTICIST

The few non-Celtic romances and chronicles which form the chief
sources of Tennyson's Idylls of the King have long been known,
and it has generally been assumed that the poet's direct contact
with Arthurian tradition in Celtic scarcely extended beyond Lady
Guest's translation of the Mabinogion.1 That this assumption is
unjustified forms the burden of the following observations. Even
the brief sketch here given should establish the fact that Tennyson
responded as heartily to the early nineteenth-century revival of
Celtic antiquities as he did to other phases of contemporary investi-
gation.

Veuillent les immortels, protecteurs de ma langue,

Que je ne dise rien qui doive etre repris!

At the outset it is improbable that, in composing a series of
poems on a theme which fascinated his imagination from youth to
old age, a writer of Tennyson's scholarly tastes and omnivorous
literary habits, should have confined his reading to a few medieval
romances and one or two Latin chronicles, when supposedly more
authentic sources of information were accessible in the works of
Celticists who claimed to present King Arthur as he appeared before
he was "touch'd by the adulterous finger" of a later age. Nor is
direct evidence lacking. Even in boyhood, when, as the poet himself
tells us,2 he first lighted upon Malory, Tennyson was investigating
in modern treatises and original sources the poetry and history of
the ancient Celts. Inspired by the newly revived Ossianic con-
troversy, he dipped into Macpherson's " Dissertation concerning
the Poems of Ossian,"3 and "The Druid's Prophecies," written

1 Contrary to the general impression, Tennyson, according to his own statement,
was not fond of romances and, in fact, prior to 1853 had never read through even the
Morte Darthur. See Alfred Lord Tennyson, A Memoir by His Son, 1897, I, 194. For
an account of Tennyson's chief sources, see especially M. W. MacCallum, Tennyson's
Idylls of the King and Arthurian Story, 1894; Walther Wtillenweber, Uber Tennyson*
Konigsidylle The Coming of Arthur und ihre Quellen (Marburg dissn.), 1889; Harold
Littledale, Essays on Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King, 1893; Richard Jones, Growth
of the Idylls of the King, 1895. Of. Morte Darthur, ed. Sommer, 1891, III 3, ff.

2 Mem., II, 128. Of. Mem., I, xii.

3 See Tennyson's quotation in the note to "On Sublimity" (Poems by Two Brothers,
1827: Facsimile edition, 1893, p. 107). For the source, see Tauchnitz Ossian, 1847,
p. 34. Another note (p. 72) shows that Tennyson had been reading Macpherson's
485] 149 [MocEEN PHILOLOGY, January, 1921

150 T*OM PEETE CROSS

by Tennyson between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, was suggested
by the description of the Roman slaughter of the druids on the Isle
of Anglesey given in Tacitus' Annales (xiv. 30). *

In a manuscript sketch of an Arthurian composition written
about 1833,2 when Tennyson was borrowing books from the Cam-
bridge University library and was studying hard,3 the poet refers to
"King Arthur's three Guineveres" and to "two Guineveres," which
latter he interprets as "primitive Christianity" and "Roman
Catholicism." No better evidence could be adduced of Tennyson's
early acquaintance with Welsh Arthurian tradition. The source of
the story that Arthur had three wives, each named Gwenhwyfar, is
the so-called historical Welsh Triads,4 several versions of which had
appeared without translation in 1801 in the famous Myvyrian
Archaiology of Wales (II, 1 ff.). As there is no evidence that Tenny-
son knew Welsh in 1833, he probably ran across the necessary
information in one or both of two works which in his day were
widely quoted and were regarded as indispensable to any serious
investigator of British antiquities during the first half of the nine-
teenth century. They are William Owen's Cambrian Biography: or

" Dissertation concerning the ^Era of Ossian" (Ossian, p. 11) or the Argument to "Comala."
Tennyson's early poetry is full of Ossianic echoes. Late in life Tennyson branded Mac-
pherson's work as ' 'poor in most parts," but he still remembered certain of the finer passages.
See Mem., I, 256, n.; A. P. Graves, Irish Lit'y and Musical Studies, 1913, p. 9. In 1880,
while in conversation with the Anglo-Irish poet William Allingham, he showed an acquaint-
ance with genuine Ossianic tradition (William Allingham, A Diary, ed. H. Allingham
and D. Radford, 1908, p. 298). He once told Alfred Perceval Graves that he much
desired to write an Irish poem, and the latter sent him Joyce's Old Celtic Romances (1879),
hoping that Tennyson would choose an Ossianic theme, preferably Oisin i Tir no n-Og
(Graves, op. cit., pp. 8-9). The result was " The Voyage of Maeldune" (1880), in which,
according to Hallam Tennyson (Mem., II, 254), the poet attempted "to represent in his
own original way the Celtic genius." Although Tennyson's interest in Ireland was
largely political, he, like Renan and Arnold, believed in the superior poetic genius of the
Celt (Mem., II, 338), and some of his most famous lines were inspired by Irish scenes and
events. See further Henry Van Dyke, Selections from Tennyson (Ath. Press), p. xxxvii;
Tennyson and his Friends, ed. Hallam, Lord Tennyson, 1911, pp. 144 f.; Letters of
William Allingham, ed. H. Allingham and E. B. Williams, 1911, passim.

1 Poems by Two Brothers, p. 69. Cf. Cambridge Tennyson, p. 762, and "Boadicea"
(1859), ibid., pp. 266 ff.

2 Mem., II, facing p. 123.

» See Mem., I, 124, 129, 130. Late in 1833 Tennyson received from Cambridge
a copy of Thomas Keightley's Fairy Mythology, which had appeared in 1828. Keight-
ley's work contains discussions of the fairy lore of many countries, including Ireland,
Wales, and Brittany. Much of Keightley's material is drawn from T. Crofton Croker's
Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, which Tennyson also knew and
which he used in his poetry. Cf. Littledale, op. cit., pp. 74, 129, 240, 281. For Tenny-
son's knowledge and use of William Carleton's Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry,
see Mem., II, 319, note.

* There are numerous series of triads. See Ferdinand Walter, Das alte Wales, 1859,
pp. 9 ff., 36 ff.

486

ALFRED TENNYSON AS A CELTICIST

151

Historical Notices of Celebrated Men among the Ancient Britons
(1803), 1 and Edward Davies' Mythology and Rites of the British
Druids (1809) .2 The former was a convenient handbook compiled,
in part from unprinted sources, by an eminent authority and co-
editor of the Myvyrian Archaiology, the latter based partly on
original material and famous because of the helio-arkite mysteries
supposedly unearthed by its learned author. The Gwenhwyfar
tradition in Welsh gives special prominence to Arthur's second and
third queens, of whom the latter is said to have betrayed her lord,
whereas the former was especially beloved by him and was in conse-
quence buried by his side at Glastonbury. The infidelity of one
of Arthur's consorts, thus assumed in ancient Welsh tradition and
set forth in greater detail in Lady Guest's notes (Mob., Part I,
1838) and in the Hanes Cymru (1842),3 furnished a strong incentive
for Tennyson's retention of Malory's adulterous Gueneuer in spite
of nineteenth-century prudishness.4

In the earliest preserved outline of an epic, written also about
1833, Tennyson describes "the sacred mount of Camelot," which
he places "on the latest limit of the West in the land of Lyonesse,
where, save the rocky Isles of Scilly, all is now wild sea."5 When the
poet removed Camelot from its traditional position inland6 and

1 S.V. Gwenhwyvar, p. 158. About 1806 Owen added the name Pughe to his
former appellation. See his life in Robert Williams' Enwogion Cymru (1852), where, by
the way, Tennyson could have confirmed his earlier impression that there were three
Guineveres. In 1838 he could have found a reference to Arthur's three queens in the
notes to Part I of Lady Guest's Mabinogion, and in 1842 in Villemarque"s Contes popu-
laires des anciens Bretons (see p. 226 of Les Romans de la Table Ronde et les Contes des
anciens Bretons, nouv. ed., 1861). See also Loth, Les Mabinogion, 1913, II, 250.

2 Tennyson may conceivably have been acquainted with the complete translations
of the Triads in William Probert's Ancient Laws of Cambria (1823, pp. 393, 410) and in
Vols. I, II, and III of The Cambro-Briton (1820-22), but they are not so likely to have been
known to him as the books by Owen and Davies.

» See also [Algernon Herbert] Britannia after the Romans, 1836, pp. 91 flf., where, as
in Tennyson's note, ancient British tradition is interpreted allegorically. Cf. Thomas
Stephens, Literature of the Kymry, 1849, p. 82. On Tennyson's knowledge of the Hanes
Cymru, see infra, p. 490.

«Cf. Rhys, Studies in the Arthurian Legend, 1891, p. 49. * Mem., II, 122.

6 For various identifications of this illusive place, see Poerster, Christian von Troyes
s&mtliche Werke, 1899, IV, 362 f.; Howard Maynadier, The Arthur of the English
Poets, 1907, p. 183, n. ; Percy's Reliques, notes to " King Ryence's Challenge," where, in a
passage quoted from Stow's Annales of England, Camelot is described as "sometimes a
famous towne or castle .... situate on a very high tor or hill." In 1839 Tennyson
ran across an English poem on the flooding of a whole district of Wales through the care-
lessness of the drunken Seithenin — a story referred to in the Triads (cf. Probert, op. cit.,
p. 393) and other Welsh documents ( M em., I, 173) . Later he doubtless read a full account
of the catastrophe in the notes to Part VII (1849) of the Mabinogion. The tradition
is referred to by Davies, op. cit., p. 242, and Bingley, North Wales, 1804, II, 20. See also
Camden, Britannia (Gough), 1806, I, 78, 91.

487

152 T6M PEETE CROSS

located it in the submerged district which, according to an oft-
recorded tradition, once formed part of the peninsula of Cornwall,1
he was doubtless actuated by reasons more cogent than a mere
poetic fancy arising from the fact that in the source of "The Lady
of Shalott" Camelot is placed near the sea.2 In a conversation said
to have taken place in I8603 Tennyson expressed the conviction
that Arthur was an historical personage and that the original scene
of his exploits was Cornwall, "though old Speed's narrative has
much that can be only traditional." The book referred to is John
Speed's History of Great Britaine, first published in 1611 as a continua-
tion of the author's Theatre of Great Britaine. In connection with an
extended discussion of the background of Arthurian tradition,
Speed reaches the conclusion that the historical Arthur lived in
Cornwall, adding, "Tindagell Castle . ; . . first brought into the
world this glorious Prince, .... and Cambula receiued his last
bloud" (p. 317). Sharon Turner in his History of the Anglo-Saxons,
with which, as we shall see in a moment, Tennyson was also
acquainted, takes much the same position,4 and Thomas Stephens5
argues that the mabinogion which fix Arthur's seat and exploits in
Cornwall are the earliest and asserts that "long after the rest of
the world had turned their eyes to Caerlleon," the Welsh bards
"persisted in confining him to Cornwall." In this connection it
should be observed that, although Tennyson made several excursions
into Wales,6 his most extensive investigations of local antiquities
appear to have been in Cornwall.7 Especially important are the
visits of 1848 and 1860. On the former occasion he discussed
Arthurian matters with the poet-antiquarian Hawker and borrowed

1 For early printed accounts of the submergence of Lyonesse, see Robert Hunt,
Popular Romances of the West of England, a new impression, 1916, pp. 190 ff. See further
Dunlop, History of Fiction (1814), American reprint of 2d London ed., 1842, I, 169.
The legend of Lyonesse was current among Cornish fishermen of Tennyson's day (M. A.
Courtney, Cornish Feasts and Folk-Lore, 1890, p 67), and when Tennyson was cruising
off the Land's End in 1887, he gazed into the depths of the sea, "searching, as he said,
for some ruins of town or castle, parts of the ancient Lyonesse" (Mem., II, 340).

8 Cf. Cambridge Tennyson, p. 797.

8 See Memories of Old Friends, Being Extracts from the Journals and Letters of Caroline
Fox, ed. H. N. Pym, 1882, II, 274 f.

« See Vol. I, pp. 272 ff., of the 4th (1823) ed. The work appeared originally in
parts between 1799 and 1805.

« Op. cit., pp. 319, 416. Cf. Cambrian Journal, 1859, p. 337; Warton, Hist. Eng.
Poet, ed. of 1871, I, 97.

« Mem., I, 173, 222; II, 108, 125; "The Golden Year," Cambridge Tennyson, p. 86.

7 Mem., I, 274 ff., 460 f., 465 f., 513; II, 125, 340, 385; Tennyson and His Friends,
pp. 145, 329, n.; Caroline Pox, op. cit., II, 138 f., 274 f.

488

ALFRED TENNYSON AS A CELTICIST 153

books and manuscripts about King Arthur, including R. J. King's
Fairy Mythology of Tintadgel.1

The portrayal of Arthur as an ideal man, Tennyson justified
from early documents, one at least of which he regarded as represent-
ing ancient Celtic tradition. In support of his position he cited
the following passage from "an old writer:" "In short God has not
made since Adam was, a man more perfect than Arthur. "2 The
passage, as Hallam Tennyson indicates, is translated from the
Welsh Brut ab Arthur, which the poet, in common with a number of
respectable authorities of his day, regarded as the source rather than
the pendant of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae*
After learning Welsh, Tennyson might have consulted the original
in the Myvyrian Archaiology (II, 299: Ac ar vyrder ni wnaeth Duw
or pan vu Ada un dyn gwblach noc Arthur) ; he actually found the
translation in Sharon Turner's History of the Anglo-Saxons.41

That Tennyson's reading before the publication of the first
Idylls (1859) had led him into the domain of Breton tradition, is
implied in a letter written in 1855 to the Breton poet Hippolyte
Lucas.5 When the laureate made an excursion into Brittany in 1864,
he visited numerous places associated with Arthur.6 He knew
Renan, and when the author of La poesie des races celtiques called
on Tennyson in London, the two discussed Breton antiquities.7
While in Brittany, Tennyson made an unsuccessful effort to meet
Villemarque, and his remark to Renan that " Villemarque" est plus
poete que savant" implies that he was acquainted at least with
the unscrupulous Breton nobleman's Barzaz-Breiz,8 a widely

* Life and Letters of R. S. Hawker, 1905, pp. 190 ft.; Mem., I, 274. Prom Hawker,
Tennyson appears to have derived the spelling "Dundagil," afterwards changed to
" Tintagil" in line 292 of " Guinevere." Cf. Idylls of the King, 1859, p. 240. See further
[R. H. Shepherd], Tennysoniana, 1866, p. 115, n.; The Poetical Works of . . , . Hawker,
1899, p. 160; Camden, Britannia (Gough), 1806, 1, 6.

2 Mem., I, 194; II, 128 f.

8 For a balance of early opinion, see Stephens, op. cit., pp. 307 ff. Cf. Walter, op. cit.,
pp. 44 ff.; Mem., II, 121, 129; Warton, op. cit., I, 98.

« Ed. cited, I, 271, n. 13. The passage is lacking in Geoffrey's Latin (Book IX,
chap, i) — a fact which may have strengthened Tennyson's conviction that the Welsh
represents a more authentic tradition.

* Mem., I, 385, n. 1.

* Mem., II, 5, 232. That Brittany is the home of Arthurian tradition, was main-
tained by various authorities during the first half of the last century. See, for example,
Dunlop, op. cit., I, 137; De la Rue, Essaia historiquea, 1834, I, 63 ff.; Stephens, op. cit.t
pp. 416 ff.; Thomas Wright, Hist, of King Arthur, 1868, I, v; Villemarqufi, Romans
de la Table Ronde, ed. cit., pp. 21 f.

* Mem., II, 232; Francis Epinasse, Life of Ernest Renan, 1895, p. 74.

s First published in 1839. For other works of VillemarquS's which may have been
known to Tennyson, see Littledale, op. cit., p. 3, n. 43. An English translation of the
Barzaz-Breiz, by Tom Taylor, appeared in 1865.

489

154 TOM PEETE CROSS

circulated collection of alleged Celtic traditional songs, some of
which had been proved spurious by Luzel in 1872.1

The Welsh romance of Geraint ap Erbin, with an English trans-
lation and notes, was published in 1840 as Part III of Lady Guest's
Mabinogion* but it was not until the spring of 1856 that it was
used by Tennyson3 as the source of the idyll of "Enid."4 By the
summer of 1856 the poet, with the assistance of Welsh school-
masters, had learned some Welsh, and according to his son,5 he and
his wife " now read together the Hanes Cymru, .... the Mabinogion
and Llywarch Hen." By the Mabinogion is of course meant Lady
Guest's edition. The work first mentioned is the Hanes Cymru, a
Chenedl y Cymry, o'r Cynoesoedd hyd at Farwolaeth Llewelyn ap
Gruffydd; that is, "History of Wales and of the Welsh People, from
Antiquity till the Death of Llewelyn ap Gruffydd." This book,
written by the distinguished Welsh scholar and antiquarian Thomas
Price, appeared in 1842, and, as it was compiled from original sources,
some unprinted, it long remained the standard native authority on
the early history of Britain. The third book read by Tennyson in
his study of Welsh is The Heroic Elegies and other Pieces of Llywarc,
Hen, Prince of the Cambrian Britons, a collection of ancient Welsh
poems accompanied by a translation and an introduction on the
bardic system, and published in 1792 by William Owen, the com-
piler of the Cambrian Biography.6 Tennyson's knowledge of Welsh
was probably not extensive. Only in the case of the Hanes Cymru
was he forced to translate his text without a "crib," and Price's
book should occasion no trouble to one reasonably conversant with
modern Welsh.7

1 De I' authenticity des chants du Barzaz-Breiz, etc.

2 Vol. I of the Mabinogion contains Parts I (1838) and II (1839); Vol. II, Parts III
(1840), IV (1842), and V (1843); Vol. Ill, Parts VI (1845) and VII (1849). The three
volumes were bound with separate title-pages dated 1849.

a por Tennyson's use of other mabinogion, see Littledale, op. cit., pp. 133 f.; see also
p. 75.

* Mem., 1,414 f. 6 Mem., I, 416.

• Tennyson may have learned of the Hanes Cymru and The Heroic Elegies from
Lady Guest's notes to Geraint (Mab., II, 145, 151), where both are referred to. They are
frequently cited by early nineteenth-century writers on the Celts.

^ Between 1856 and 1859 Tennyson discovered "that the 'E' of 'Enid' was pro-
nounced short (as if it were spelt 'Ennid')" (!) and accordingly changed "wedded
Enid" in line 4 of the earlier version to "married Enid" as it now appears in "The
Marriage of Geraint" (Mem., II, 125, n.2). On the point, see Dosparth Ederyn Davod
Aur, tr. John Williams, ab Ithel, 1856, p. 5, where just this pronunciation is given for

490

ALFRED TENNYSON AS A CELTICIST

155

Tennyson completed the original draft of " Merlin and Nimue"
in March, 1856. As is implied in the legend Enid and Nimue:
The True and the False, which appeared on the title-page of the
earliest volume of Idylls, printed in 1857,1 Tennyson's choice of
the story of "Enid" as his next subject was partly determined by
the contrast between the heroine and the guileful nymph of the
preceding idyll. There is, however, another and an equally
cogent reason why Tennyson should have felt that no Arthurian
epic ought to lack an account of Geraint. Not only must Tennyson's
avowed faith in a historical Arthur2 have found strong confirmation
in Price's twelve-page discussion of that hero, but the poet must
have been impressed with the Welsh scholar's explicit assertion
that no history of Arthur should disregard Geraint.3 According
to the Marwnad Geraint ab Erbin, published in the Heroic Elegies*
and quoted in part in the Hanes Cymru, Geraint perished while
serving with Arthur in the battle of Llongporth, a tradition which,
although lacking in the mabinogi of Geraint, Tennyson utilized in
the last two lines of "Enid" as first written.5

One of the most far-reaching and as yet neglected influences
during the Romantic revival of British antiquities emanated from
a collection of Welsh material of various ages and degrees of trust-
worthiness, made during the late eighteenth century by Edward
Williams (lolo Morganwg) and printed in various books, notably

early Welsh e. For the correct value, see John Strachan, An Introduction to Early
Welsh, 1909, p. 2. That modern Welsh e may be either long or short, Tennyson might,
of course, have learned from any one of several grammars. The fanciful etymology of
Nimue referred to by Tennyson (Mem., II, 366), I have been unable to run down. It
suggests the discussion of " nynu, to kindle, " in John Williams' Gomer, Second Part, 1854,
p. 57. See further Miss Paton, Radcliffe Coll. Monog., XIII, 240 fl.

1 But not published. Cf. Mem., I, 418, 436. On the bibliography of the Idylls, see
Jones, op. cit., 45 ff., 159 flf.; T. J. Wise, A Bibliography of . . . . Tennyson, 1908,
pp. 148 flf., 161, 241.

2 Mem., II, 121, 129. Tennyson's belief was of course shared by a long line of
authorities. Cf. Owen, Camb. Biog., pp. 13 ff.; R. H. Fletcher, Harvard Studies and
Notes, IX, s.v. Arthur in Index.

8 The passage in Price's account runs: Yn mhlith y gwr onion o'r ardaloedd yma, nid
cyfiawn fyddai annghofio enw Geraint ab Erbin, yr hwn oedd dywysog o'r dalaeth a elwid
Dyfnaint, [Devon] a'r hwn a elwir yn y Trioedd, yn un o'r " Tri Llynghesawg ynys Brydain"
(Hanes Cymru, p. 275). Geraint had already been treated as historical by Owen (Camb,
Biog., p. 130), by Davies (op. cit., p. 379, note), and by Turner (Vindication, pp. 172 ff.)
See also Cambrian Register, 1818, p. 210.

4 Printed also in the Myvyrian, I, 101; Skene, Four Ancient Books of Wales, 1868,
I, 266 flf.; II, 37 flf.

s See Nicoll and Wise, Lity. Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century, 1896, II, 233.

491

'
156 TOM PEETE CROSS

in the Myvyrian Archaiology, the Cyfrinach Beirdd Ynys Prydain
(1829), the I do Manuscripts (1848), and a volume entitled Barddas;
or a Collection of Original Documents, Illustrative of the Theology,
Wisdom and Usages of the Bardo-Druidic System of the Isle of Britain,
the latter published in 1862 with a translation and notes by the
Rev. John Williams ab Ithel, whose too ready acceptance of lolo
Morgan wg's documents irritated Matthew Arnold. The last-named
work is probably the Barddas1 of which the first volume came into
Tennyson's possession in 1867.2 Both Barddas and the lolo Manu-
scripts give prominence to the oft-quoted bardic motto, Y gwir yn erbyn
y byd (the truth against the world),3 which Tennyson claimed as his
favorite and in 1868 had prominently emblazoned on the threshold
of Aldworth.4 In 1869 he recommended it as "a very old British
apothegm" to the Tennyson Society of Philadelphia,5 and in
" Harold " (published 1876) he put it into the mouth of the hero
(II, ii, 218).

In 1881, according to J. C. Walters,6 Tennyson was elected vice-
president of the Welsh National Eisteddfod.

Most of the books used by Tennyson overemphasize the
antiquity of bardic tradition and in some cases their conclusions are
vitiated by fantastic theories regarding the philosophy and religion
of the ancient Celts,7 but the important fact which triumphantly
emerges from the material presented above is that Tennyson made
an honest effort to ground his Idylls on the most reputable authori-
ties of his day.

TOM PEETE CROSS
UNIVERSITY OP CHICAGO

Apparently no more were published.

2 M em., II, 49 1. Tennyson's way of referring to the book makes it likely that this
is the work meant rather than R. J. Prys's Barddas y Cymry, Part I, 1851. Cf. Arch.
Cambr., N.S., III, 160.

« Also quoted by Owen, Heroic Elegies, p. xxv, and by Price, Hanes Cymru, pp. 49 f .
* See Tennyson and His Friends, p. 250; H. J. Jennings, Lord Tennyson, 1884, p. 197.
8 Mem., II, 91.
8 Tennyson: Poet, Philosopher, and Idealist, 1893, p. 359.

7 See Stephens, op. cit., passim, and D. W. Nash, Taliesin, or the Bards and Druids of
Britain, 1858.

SOME ALLUSIONS TO RICHARD TARLETON

A few references to Tarleton which Halliwell and Hazlitt failed
to note in their editions of the Jests may prove of interest to students
of the drama, especially in view of Mr. W. J. Lawrence's recent
and stimulating discussion of the famous clown.1

1. 0 fustie worlde! Were there anie commendable passage to Styx
and Acharon I would go live with Tarleton. — Returne from Parnassus
Part I (1597?), I, i.

2 as farre unfit for their profession, as Tarletons toyea

for Paules Pulpit: betwixt which, though I make a comparison, yet to the
place I reserue a reuerend regarde. — J. M., A Health to the Gentlemanly
Profession of Seruingmen (1598), Sig. B 3.

3. When Tarlton clown'd it in a pleasant vaine,
And with conceites, did good opinion game
Upon the Stage, his merry humors shop.

Clownes knew the Clowne, by his great clownish slop.
But now th' are gulTd, for present fashion sayes,
Dick Tarltons part, gentlemens breeches playes.
—Samuel Rowlands, Knave of Hearts (1600), Epigram 30.

4. It is not amisse sometimes to goe from home, to heare what
newes there is at home; as Tarlton told the Queene, hee was going to
London, to heare what newes at court. — R. Junius, The Drunkard's Character
(1638), p. 669.

5. Give room ye Ghosts of Tarlton, Scoggin, Summers,
Minerva's Masquers, and the Muses Mummers.

— S. F., "On the Death of Archee the late Kings Jester,"
Sportive Funeral Ekgies (1656).

More significant is the extemporal poem on the subject "Wher's
Tarleton ?" in Quips upon Questions (1600) by " Clunnyco de Curtanio
Snuffe" (i.e., John Singer?):

6. One askes where Tarleton is, yet knowes hee's dead,
Foole, sayes the other, who can tell thee that ?
Asse, quoth the first, I can: bow downe thy head,
Lend but an eare and listen. Sir, to what ?

1st come to Sir, quoth he, euen now twas Foole,
One Asse can with an other beare much rule.

» "On the Underrated Genius of Dick Tarleton," London Mercury, May, 1920.
4931 157 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, January, 1921

'
158 THORNTON S. GRAVES

Well, Asse or Foole, the second sayes, go on:

I say hee's dead. I true, and so say I.

And yet a Hues too, though some say hee's gon.

Till you approue this, I must say you lie.

Lie, quoth the first, the stab with that must go,

I do not say you lie, I say I must say so.

A Collier after Tarletons death did talke,

And sayd, he heard some say that he was dead:

A simple man that knew not Cheese from Chaulke,

Yet simple men must toyle in wise mens stead.

Vnto the Play he came to see him there,

When all was done, still was he not the nere.

He calles a loude, and sayd that he would see him,
For well he knew it was but rumourd prate:
The people laught a good, and wisht to free him,
Because of further mirth from this debate.
The Collier sayd, the squint of Tarletons eie,
Was a sure marke that he should neuer die.

Within the Play past, was his picture vsd,1
Which when the fellow saw, he laught aloud:
A ha, quoth he, I knew we were abusde,
That he was kept away from all this croude.
The simple man was quiet, and departed,
And hauing scene his Picture, was glad harted.

So with thy selfe it seemes, that knowes he's dead,
And yet desires to know where Tarleton is:
I say he liues, yet you say no; your head
Will neuer thinke, ne yet beleeue halfe this.
Go too, hee's gone, and in his bodyes stead,
His name will Hue long after he is dead.

So, with the Collier, I must thinke he Hues,
When but his name remaines in memorie;
What credite can I yeelde to such repreeues,
When at the most, tis but vncertaintie.
Now am I a foole in deed? So let that passe,
Before I goe, He quit thee with the asse.

What, is his name Letters, and no more ?

Can Letters Hue, that breathe not, nor haue life ?

» Note the use of Tarleton's picture in Wilson's Three Lords and Three Ladies of
London.

494

SOME ALLUSIONS TO RICHARD TARLETON 159

No, no, his Fame Hues, who hath layde in store
His actes and deedes : therefore conclude this strife,
Else all that heare vs, striue and breed this mutenie,
Will bid vs keepe the Colliar foole for company.

Well, to resolue this question, yet say I,

That Tarletons name is heare, though he be gone.

You say not, Whers his Body that did die ?

But, where is Tarleton f Whers his name alone ?

His Name is heere: tis true, I credite it.

His Body's dead, few Clownes will haue his wit.

QUIP:

Though he be dead, dispaire not of thy wisedome,
What wit thou hast not yet, in time may come:
But thus we see, two Dogges striue for a bone,
Bout him that had wit, till them selues haue none.

Even more interesting is the passage in Henry Peacham's essay
"Of Parents and Children " found in his The Truth of Our Times1
(1638). In discussing the incorrect method of handling the prodigal
he uses the following illustration :

7. I remember when I was a School-boy in London, Tarlton acted a
third sons part, such a one as I now speake of: His father being a very
rich man, and lying upon his death-bed, called his three sonnes about him,
who with teares, and on their knees craved his blessing, and to the eldest
sonne, said hee, you are mine heire, and my land must descend upon you,
and I pray God blesse you with it: The eldest sonne replyed, Father,
I trust in God you shall yet live to enjoy it yourself e. To the second sonne,
(said he) you are a scholler, and what profession soever you take upon
you, out of my land I allow you threescore pounds a yeare towards
your maintenance, and three hundred pounds to buy you books, as his
brother, he weeping answer'd, I trust father you shall live to enjoy your
money your selfe, I desire it not, &c. To the third, which was Tarlton,
(who came like a rogue in a foule shirt without a band, and in a blew coat
with one sleeve, his stockings out at the heeles, and his head full of straw
and feathers) as for you sirrah, quoth he) you know how often I have fetched
you out of Newgate and Bridewell, you have beene an ungracious villaine,

1 This collection of fourteen essays deserves to be better known. In addition to the
numerous autobiographical passages (cf. pp. 13, 26, 39, 41, 47, 53, 71, 92, 123) it discusses
certain matters in a manner quite modern. It explodes various popular errors of the
time in the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, pleads for the higher pay of schoolmasters,
puts forth some uncommonly sane suggestions regarding the education of boys, discusses
at some length the pecuniary dangers confronting the authors of "good" books, gives
some good advice, based on personal observation and experience, concerning traveling, etc.

495

160 THORNTON S. GRAVES

I have nothing to bequeath to you but the gallowes and a rope: Tarlton
weeping and sobbing upon his knee (as his brothers) said, 0 Father, I doe not
desire it, I trust in God you shall live to enjoy it your selfe [pp. 103-5].

It is possible that this old play in which Tarleton made such an
impression upon the youthful mind of his auditor is another instance
of the dramatic treatment in England of the prodigal son motif.1
The passage is interesting in other respects. It argues that Tarleton
was apparently rather careful with respect to his make-up, and shows
that, if The Hundred Merry Tales, as Hazlitt thinks entirely possible,
had fallen into disrepute in higher quarters about 1582, at least one
popular actor of the time did not hesitate to present a scene taken
from the old jest-book; for the episode described by Peacham is
obviously based upon the jest "Of the syk man that bequethyd hys
thyrd son a lytell ground with the galows," as it is titled in
Dr. Oesterley's edition of the Tales — the imperfect "Of the ryche
man and his two sonnes" of Hazlitt 's edition.

THORNTON S. GRAVES
TRINITY COLLEGE, NORTH CAROLINA

i In this connection a Scottish reference to a drama dealing with the prodigal son
may be cited, since it has not, I believe, been noted by students of the stage. Cox in his
Sabbath Laws, p. 299, states that the following entry, dated July 1, 1574, occurs in the
Kirk-Session of St. Andrews: "The said day, anent the supplication given by
Mr. Patrick Auchinlek, for procuring licence to play the comedy mentioned in St. Luke's
Evangel of the Forlorn Son [the Prodigal Son], upon Sunday, the 1st day of August
next to come." Several members of the Kirk were appointed to examine the play, and
if it met with their approval, it was to be allowed, provided it did not draw people away
from services either in the forenoon or afternoon.

496

NEW LIFE-RECORDS OF CHAUCER
ADDENDUM

As a supplement to the note which I printed in 1918 (Modern
Philology, XVI, 49 ff.), containing transcripts of two Chancery
warrants relating respectively to Chaucer's appointment in 1374 to
the offices of controller of the custom and subsidy of wools, etc., and
controller of the petty custom, and to the permission given to
Thomas Evesham in 1377 to act as Chaucer's deputy in the former
office, I give below the original texts of two corresponding patents,
of which in my former note I could give only the abstracts contained
in the Calendar of the Patent Rolls.
Patent Rolls, 48 Edward III, Part I, membrane 13.

Rex Omnibus ad quos etc. Sciatis quod concessimus dilecto nobis Gal-
fn'do Chaucer officia tarn contrarotulatoris custume et subsidij lanarum

coriorum et pellium lanutaruw qwam Contrarotulatoris parue
pro Galfncfo • ± • i . » m

custume vmorum ac trmm denanorum de libra necnon pan-
Chaucer ,. ,.

norum et aharum mercandisarum quarumcumque custuma-

bilium per Mercatores tarn indigenas quam alienigenas nobis debitorum in
portu Londonte Habenda quamdiu nobi's placuerit percipiendo in officiis
illis tantum quantum alij Contrarotulatores custumarww in portu predicto1
hujusmodi hactenws percipere consueuerunt Ita quod idem Galfridus
rotulos suos dic^a officia tangentes manu sua propria scribat et continue
moretwr ibidem et omnia que ad officia ilia pertinent in propria persona sua
et non per substitutum suum faciat et exequatur Volentes qwod tarn altera
pars sigilli nosfri quod dicititr Coket qwam altera pars alterius sigilli nosfri
pro paruis custumis deputati in portu predicto in custodia predict Galfrtdi
remaneant qwamdiu officia haftuerit supradic^a In cuiws etc. Teste J&ege
apud 'Westmonasterium viij die Junij.

per brewe de priuato sigillo.
Patent Rolls, 51 Edward III, membrane 14.

Reo; Omnibus ad quos etc. salwtem. Sciatis quod cum dilecftis nobis
Galfrfdus Chaucer Contrarotulator custume et subsidiorwm lanarwm coriorum
et pellium lanutarwm ac aliarum rerwm custumabilium in
De deputato portu Ciuitatis nostre Londonz'e sepius in obsequio nostro

in partibus remotis occupatus existit Ita qttod super
excercicio officij predict continue in persona sua morari
non valeat Ac idem Galfridus dilectum nobis Thomam de Euesham ad
dictum officium Contrarotulatoris loco ipsius Galfridi in absencia sua

i "in portu predicto" is interlined.
497] 161 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, January, 1921

Contrarotulatoris
deputato.

162 SAMUEL MOORE

excercendww sub se deputauerit vt accepimws Nos ex causa predicts, volumes
et concedim-ws quod idem Thomas officium prediction loco ipsius Galfndi
quociens ipsiwn abesse contigerit faciat et exequatur et rotulos dicti officij
manu sua propria scribat in forma debita et consueta qwamdiu nobis et eidem
Galfrwto placuerit. In cuiws etc. Tests vt supra.1
per billow Thesaurarii.2

No other documents have been found which relate to the matters
dealt with in these two patents, but the full text of the patents them-
selves furnishes us with some details that are not included in the
abstracts.

The patent of 48 Edward III (1374) contains the usual stipula-
tion that Chaucer write the rolls pertaining to the offices with his
own hand and execute his duties in person and not by a substitute;
this stipulation is contained also in the Chancery warrant of the same
date.

The patent of 51 Edward III (1377) is not undated (as I
stated in my former note), but is dated May 10.3 The words
quociens ipsum abesse contigerit (not represented in the abstract or
in the Chancery warrant of 1377) might be taken to indicate that
the permission Chaucer received to depute Evesham to execute the
duties of his office amounted practically to a permission to execute
the office regularly by deputy. It is clear, however, that the per-
mission given Chaucer on May 8 had immediate reference to
Chaucer 's absence from England between February 17 and March
25, 1377, and to his departure again for France on April 30 im-
mediately following.4

SAMUEL MOORE

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

i "Teste Hege apud Westmonasterium x die Maij."

* For these transcripts I am indebted to the kindness of Edward Salisbury, Esq., of
the Public Record Office.

* See note 1 above.

« Life-Records of Chaucer, Document 101, p. 203.

REVIEWS AND NOTICES

The Pearl Edited by CHARLES G. OSGOOD, JR. Boston: D. C.
Heath & Co., 1906.

A Good Short Debate between Winner and Waster. Edited by SIR
ISRAEL GOLLANCZ. London: Humphrey Milford; Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1920.

Within the last fourteen years the study of Middle English literature
has been furthered by a series of editions of the most important alliterative
poems in inexpensive, carefully annotated form. Osgood's Pearl (which was
preceded by the edition of Gollancz, 1891) has been followed by Gollancz1
editions of Patience, 1913, The Parliament of the Three Ages, 1915, and
Winner and Waster, 1920, Bjorkmann's Mori Arthure, 1915, Hanford and
Steadman's Death and Liffe, 1918, and Robert J. Menner's Purity (i.e.,
Cleanness'), 1920. Thus only a few of the most interesting texts, such as
The Siege of Jerusalem, St. Erkenwald, and Gawain and the Green Knight,
remain inedited. Of the editions cited Osgood's Pearl, which is extensively
used in colleges and universities and which received only brief mention in
the philological journals at the time of its appearance, and Gollancz' Winner
and Waster deserve attention because their defects emphasize certain
important principles of text-editing.

In Professor Osgood's Pearl the Introduction concisely and interestingly
discusses such subjects as the manuscript, date, dialect, origins, and literary
qualities of the poem. Though one might cavil at some of the judgments
there expressed, especially, in view of Professor Schofield's well-established
arguments, at the autobiographical interpretation of the poem, and at the
editor's easy acceptance of Trautmann's "proof" of identity of authorship
of Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience (Anglia, 7,
109-46), this introduction is in the main satisfactory. Osgood's treatment
of the text, also, is sound. His footnotes give all the readings of earlier
editions and the emendations suggested by scholars, but his text generally
follows the manuscript scrupulously, making only minor alterations. In
but one case does he attempt a violent alteration: in line 197 he changes
beau uiys to bleaunt of biys. There is obviously no likelihood that the
manuscript reading is a mistake for a phrase so entirely different in appear-
ance. Hence in making it the editor is really rewriting his text rather than
attempting to restore an original reading. By a series of oversights Professor
Osgood has failed to make the best connections with the edition of Gollancz.
Thus the emendation besternays, line 307, was suggested by Gollancz (p. 115
499] 163

164 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

of his edition) but is not credited to the earlier editor. Again in his note
to line 115 Osgood states that Gollancz in an article accepted Morris' defini-
tion of strothe but does not say that in his edition Gollancz rejected that
meaning and offered a new one (p. 111). The note to line 459 is interesting:
"naule. G., regardless of phonology, sense or poetic delicacy, renders 'navel'
(OE. nafola)." The meaning of the remark so far as it affects phonology
is not clear, because naule is easily derived from OE. nafola, but cannot
phonetically be derived from OE. ncegel (Osgood's etymon). The editor's
ideas of "poetic delicacy" were evidently the guiding force of his choice;
"navel " is undoubtedly right. In other cases, particularly in the explanation
of difficult words, Professor Osgood has silently rejected meanings given by
Gollancz which are decidedly preferable to his own: e.g., it is inconceivable
that whatez (1. 1041), riming with fatej (1. 1038) and datej (1. 1040), is
wat$t preterite of the verb to be. Perhaps Gollancz' interpretation is
far-fetched, but at least it is phonetically possible. Possibly the word
is ON. hvetja, "to incite," which according to a remark by Egilsson, s.fl.
hvata, seems to have had a "Norwegian" form in a. In his glossary Osgood
gives for agrete (1.560) "for the job" without indicating its etymology;
Gollancz (p. 120) refers it to the Old French d gret, "according to mutual
agreement."

In the Glossary, however, lies the great weakness of Professor Osgood's
edition. Though the fullness of its references and the statement of deriva-
tions are admirable features, the meanings assigned to words are entirely
unreliable. Of course the majority of the words are correctly defined. But
inserted among the correct definitions are many meanings ad locum. Con-
sequently a person not thoroughly familiar with Middle English (and only
such a person needs a glossary) would by using this glossary fail to see the
figurative and even at times violently wrenched meanings which the author
of Pearl employed. Thus apert means primarily "openly," not "frankly";
balke means "the strip of unplowed land between two fields," not "mound
(of a grave) ' ' ; bolde means " bold," not ' 'shameless " ( !) ; bylde means ' ' build,"
not "cause to spring up"; chere means "face," not "demeanor"; consciens
means "consciousness," not "conviction"; dytte means "dull, foolish,"
not "slow"; empryse means "enterprise," not "glory": faste means "fast,
firm," not "hard" or "in haste"; flet means "floor of a hall," not "ground";
frayne means "ask," not "desire"; grow means "grow," not "issue";
ledden means "speech, voice," not "sound of many voices"; mete means
"food," not "act of eating"; etc. It is interesting to note that in one case
at least Dr. Menner has observed this defect of Osgood's glossary; in com-
menting on Osgood's translation of a passage he says: "But this interpreta-
tion necessitates a violent wrenching of the meaning of endure, which means
not 'avail' or 'be equal to a task' (Osgood's glossary) but 'suffer, bear'"
(Purity, p. 73). The ultimate force of a word in a given passage may be
that stated by Professor Osgood, but it may have reached that meaning

500

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 165

through some figure or extension which the reader of the poem should feel.
In addition to this gravest fault, there are many minor slips in the Glossary:
e.g., page 109, OF. on efen should read OE. on efen; page 111, stecan should
be stecian; page 122, the derivation of comfort is omitted; page 174, restay
.... pres 3 pi. restayed, should read pret. In other cases Professor Osgood
gives dubious etymologies: e.g., dy%e and derbe are probably English rather
than Scandinavian in derivation, and ruful is probably English rather than
French. Two words of the form breme appear; they are one word, from
OE. breme meaning "famous," then "proud," "self-assertive." A remark
appended to the definition of kde, "man," "used to address a dependent or
an inferior," is probably wrong: the word is applied to Gawain hi Gawain
and the Green Knight, line 540.

Aside from the minor errors just noted, observation of Professor Osgood's
glossary shows the necessity of giving primary meanings of words and, in
cases where a secondary, derived, or figurative meaning is necessary, of
stating that only after the primary meaning.

Professor Gollancz' edition of Winner and Waster is the third of his
series of "Select Early English Poems." Like its predecessors, it contains
a preface which discusses manuscript, authorship, date, and similar subjects.
It then gives text, translation, notes, and glossary. In the various parts
of the book Professor Gollancz has done much to make this striking poem
understandable. But his treatment of the text is quite out of keeping with
his previous work as editor and directly contradictory to the principles
set down in the books on text-criticism and followed by the best modern
editors. To put the matter briefly: in a poem of 503 lines he has made some
130 emendations. Moreover, as the manuscript readings are not recorded
at the foot of the pages, but on two unnumbered sheets near the end of the
book, the reader cannot readily see how much the editor has deviated from
his manuscript in any given place. Professor Gollancz justifies his free
treatment of this text by certain statements in his Preface (p. 1): "The
scribe must have copied Wynnere and Wastoure from a manuscript illegible
in many parts. A minute study has revealed an unexpectedly large number
of errors due to corruption, misreading, substitution of words and other

causes The task of dealing with the many errors has necessitated

very bold treatment of the text, as may be seen from the long list of emenda-
tions." Let us see whether so large a number of emendations was necessary.

In many cases Professor Gollancz introduces an emendation apparently
for metrical reasons: e.g., line 26, and japes [can] telle; line 73, one hat[e]full
beste (MS hattfull)', line 77, in quart[e]res foure; line 158, with bokel[e]s
twayne; line 194, bow[e]men many; line 266, in wyntt[e]res nyghttis; line
340, quart[e]red swannes. The first four and the sixth of these as they
appear in the manuscript contain five syllables (including final e). Are
five syllables too few for a second half-line ? Apparently not, for Professor
Gollancz has allowed half-lines of five syllables to stand in his text in lines

501

166 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

46, 52, 61, 156, 157, 179, 335, 476, and many others. In the fifth case four
syllables seem to be too few. Yet in lines 65, 144, 356 we find but four
syllables. Perhaps it is not number of syllables that determines Professor
Gollancz' action, but arrangement. As any possible arrangement of syllables
seems to be found in alliterative poetry, however, it is certainly not justifiable
to alter a text for that reason. If grammatical considerations caused Professor
Gollancz to insert the e in such cases, he does not follow them consistently;
note wondres (1. 84), prechours (1. 169), boded (1. 182). In other cases Pro-
fessor Gollancz seems to have emended to "restore" alliteration to a line.
Examples are lines 79, 121, 314, 369, 386. Two objections may be made to
this practice: (1) as practically all alliterative poems contain some lines
lacking in alliteration it may be that authors regarded themselves as free to
insert such a line occasionally; (2) though a clever editor can alter one word
so as to make alliteration, he can have no certainty that he has altered the
right one or that he has chosen the right synonym for it; hence such emenda-
tions perhaps improve a poem but do not restore the author's reading. In
other cases Gollancz has emended so as to get two alliterations in the first
half-line: e.g., in line 266 he changes In playinge and in wakinge to In
[wraxl]inge and in wakynge; in line 277 he inserts te, And thou wolle[te] to the
tauerne. See also lines 125, 132, 177. Yet he leaves lines 103 and 476 with
but a single alliteration in each half-line. Any acquaintance with alliterative
verse shows that such half-lines are not infrequent, and hence emendation
is entirely unwarranted. In a third type of cases Gollancz apparently does
not recognize a permitted alliteration of c with g, and s with sch, and emends,
as in line 275 (see K. Schumacher, Studien uber den Stabreim in der m.e.
Alliterationsdichtung, p. 129) and line 400 (compare 1. 436 where he has
retained the s, sch alliteration). It is to be remarked that Professor Gollancz
emended for the same reasons in his second edition of Parlement; cf. lines
106, 113. If the purpose of emendation is to restore the text as the author
wrote it, alteration is not justifiable in cases of the sort considered above.

In another series of cases Professor Gollancz changes the tense of a verb
so as to avoid the alternation of the preterite and the historical present.
Thus in line 37 he changes threpen to threped; line 125, send to sendes; line
177, semyde to semyth; line 187, knewe to knowe; etc. If Professor Gollancz
applies this principle to his edition of Gawain and the Green Knight he will
have a busy tune regularizing tenses. As a matter of fact in Winner and
Waster he occasionally leaves this mixture of tenses, e.g., in lines 121, 122.
A casual reading of fourteenth-century literature shows that the authors
used historical presents interchangeably with preterites.

In many instances where the text gives intelligible meaning Professor
Gollancz emends because he thinks he can improve the sense: e.g., in lines 5
and 6 he changes wyle to wylk and wyse to wyli; yet "For now all is wit and
wile that we deal with, wise words and sly," gives good sense. In line 22
he changes wroghte to writen though the poet's use of the expression words

502

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 167

wrought is verified by line 25. In line 10 he changes when he hare eldes, which
looks like an old idiomatic phrase, "when he grows old and hoar," to the
sophisticated when he horefor eld es. In line 15 he inserts no unnecessarily
(again modernizing); for boyes is used contemptuously as in Pearl 806, and
Piers the Plowman, B. XI, 197; while blode probably means "courage."
In line 55 alle is changed to als I very improbably. Alle means the people
in general, members of the two armies and others, who would naturally
prefer peace to war. The emendation makes it necessary to understand
line 59 as meaning that as the dreamer watched some one raised up the
cabin. In line 79 out makes perfect sense; the beasts were from the English
coat of arms. In line 83 kynge is preferable to knyghte; the dreamer
recognized the king from the besants on the cabin. Neither he nor the reader
is in the least interested in the identity of the herald. In line 108 the altera-
tion of $is (which, despite the note, makes natural sense) to y serue is
obviously improper. Perhaps the poet would have written y serue had he
thought of it, but certainly we have no reason to suppose that he did. In
line 134 the MS reading kynge ryche makes sense; Gollancz' reading is more
pointed, but it is unnecessary. In line 137 segge is doubtless addressed to
the reader and need not be plural. Space limitations forbid giving more
examples of unnecessary emendations. In the largest number of cases the
manuscript reading can be made to give intelligible sense.1

In a few places, however, the manuscript is unsatisfactory, and in these
Professor Gollancz has given very ingenious and probable emendations;
indeed he cannot be praised too highly for such emendations as those by
means of which he has given point and meaning to the descriptions of the
banners. In line 144 bulles for bibulles, in line 157 galegs for galeys are almost
certainly restorations of the author's text.

Brilliant as some of these emendations are and grateful as all students
of Middle English literature must be to the man who made them, they do
not justify the many unnecessary alterations made in the text of Winner
and Waster. In fact this edition is a relapse to the free methods of text-
editing of an earlier period or of such contemporary scholars as Holthausen.
Our experience with the text of Beowulf and other frequently edited poems
has shown that when we do not understand a passage the fault is more
probably with us than with the manuscript; and hence only when we have
the strongest reasons for supposing a scribal error should we emend. Some
of us think we shouldn't do so even then. As such texts as Winner and
Waster will never be read by anyone but a scholar, why not print the text
diplomatically and in notes suggest emendations ?

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO J- R- HULBEBT

i Dr. J. M. Steadman, Jr., calls my attention to the fact that in a number of
instances the emendations adopted by Gollancz were suggested by Schumacher (op. cit.,
pp. 174-75) but are not credited to him. These appear in 11. 94, 132, 277, 369, 471.
For other defects in Gollancz' edition, in particular a surprisingly large number of mis-
readings of the Manuscript, see Dr. Steadman's forthcoming review in Modern Language
Notes.

503

168 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

A Study of Shakespeare's Versification, with an Inquiry into the
Trustworthiness of the Early Texts, an Examination of the 1616
Folio of Ben Jonson's Works, and Appendices, Including a
Revised Text of Antony and Cleopatra. By M. A. BAYFIELD.
Cambridge: University Press, 1920. Pp. xii-f-521.
In essentials this is an important book. "Its purpose is," the Preface
states, "first to give an intelligible and consistent account of the structure
and characteristic features of his [Shakespeare's] dramatic verse." The
intelligibility and consistency are marred by insistence on the wayward
theory of a trochaic basis for English meter, previously set forth by the
author, and by a profuse assumption of monosyllabic and often difficult
polysyllabic feet. It seems to most students of English poetry that such
hora novissima, thick-and-thin theories of verse are not only false but mean-
ingless; that they are less sufficient than a simple description of all good
verse, especially dramatic, as a weaving about a verse-norm of any sort of
arabesque variant which leaves the norm still perceptible; that the usual
norm, since English verse tends to begin with an unaccented and end with
an accented syllable, is both in origin and actually what is called iambic;
but that unless a poet is otherwise known to have followed some ars poetica
of more rigid kind, all Procrustean, pseudo-classical schemes for his verse
are as painful to the reader as they would have been to the poet. The older
theories of prosody, to put the thing briefly, did not sufficiently recognize
gradations, and erred by treating it hi the manner of the mathematical and
not the biological sciences. Herein Mr. Bayfield the classicist also errs.
But his perverse theory, with all the arbitrary judgments and strong language1
which go with it, is not essential to the fresh contribution made by his book.
This, namely, is the proof that Shakespeare employed slurred three-syllable
"feet" far m&re than has been recognized, and more than was usual in his
day; that he employed them oftener and oftener; that the early editions,
especially the First Folio, tend purposely to conceal or alter them; that
such colloquial forms as "do't," "is't," used in the Folio for this purpose,
are, however, not monosyllabic but merely indicate slurring. The last
two points are well supported by examination of the quartos, of prose
passages, and of the 1616 folio of Jonson. It is Shakespeare's preference
for the fuller manner of recitation, Mr. Bayfield opines (p. 291), "which he
had in his mind more than anything else when he made Hamlet say to the
players, 'Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly
on the tongue.'" Here we find Mr. Bayfield 's second purpose, "to show
that there are many thousands of lines of it [the poet's dramatic verse] that

i He brands as "rag-time scansions" (p. 10) such lovely or finished movements as
that of Dante's

Dolce color d'oriental zafflro,
and of Chaucer's

Liveth a lyf blisful and ordinat.

504

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 169

are given in modern texts not as their author intended them to be delivered,
but clipped and trimmed," etc. Hereby he displaces the timid and conven-
tional treatments of the subject by Fleay, Abbott, and less-known writers.
'The reader must grant him that the proportion of such extended feet, as
to which he presents figures, affords at times a fresh kind of evidence for
dating the plays, and that the reader and the actor should allow themselves
more freedom than heretofore in pronouncing light syllables, however much
such abbreviations as "on't," "i'th'," may be endeared by association.
As to choosing printed forms, whether an editor should go counter to the
wholesome modern tendency, more and more justified by bibilographical
science, to stick to the early authorities, is another question. Of the fruit-
fulness of this minute study of the early editions, and of the influence of
one or two eminent English exponents of it, this book is one more example,
based though it is like Nebuchadnezzar's image. There is yet more infil-
tration of clay than I have shown; but there is also more iron, notably the
attack (pp. 403 ff.) on Dowden's sentimental view as to Shakespeare's
"period of gloom." There is iron enough to keep the book erect. It is a
singular mixture of the amateurish and the doctrinaire with diligence,
enterprise, and keenness.

JOHN S. P. TATLOCK
LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY

RECENT WORKS ON PHASES OF THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE
A brief appraisal is given here of a group of works in the field of the
Renaissance in England or having a bearing upon it, in order that attention
may be called, in the limited space available, to as many as possible of the
recent studies that are important for the period.

A survey of the Renaissance and Reformation in Europe as a whole is
attempted in the two volumes of Henry Osborn Taylor's Thought and
Expression in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1920). Of the
five divisions of the work, the first is given to a study of the Renaissance in
Italy from Petrarch and Boccaccio to Ariosto, with special chapters for
the "publicists" and for the painters. The second records the movements
in Germany that culminated in Erasmus and Luther. The third surveys
those of France from Louis XI to Calvin with emphasis on a small number of
outstanding figures. The fourth deals with England, elaborating— after
-a passing sketch of the educational thought and activity of the sixteenth
century — Wycliffe's career, Lollardism in the fifteenth century, and the
progress of the Reformation in its relation to the political problems of the
sixteenth century from Tyndale to Hooker. It closes with succinct estimates
and eulogies of a small group of men of action and of literary men as inspired
voices of the great age. The fifth is concerned with the progress of philosophy
and science in the period. The book will prove of real value both to the
.special student, who will find in it a large body of information in a compact

505

170 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

form, and to the general reader, who will get something of the sweep and
complexity of the period and will grasp the significance of the great names
without confusing them with those of secondary importance. It is marked
by a clear presentation, a skilful digesting of abstract philosophies, and an
enthusiasm for most of the great men and many of the phases of the
Renaissance.

Unfortunately, however, stimulating as the book is, it fails to give a
perspective that the present reviewer regards as essential for an adequate
grasp of the meaning of the sixteenth century. The emphasis on the Refor-
mation and its dramatic figures like Luther, Calvin, and Tyndale makes
the work a study of the Reformation primarily, while the philosophy and
science of the age as expressive of its thought are stressed above literature
and the study of humanism. All this may be according to Mr. Taylor's
estimate of relative values in the field, but no work proposing to survey all
the important aspects of the sixteenth century should neglect the new ideals
in education, culture, and literature. In stressing the continuance of
the culture and learning of the Middle Ages the author rejects the term
Renaissance in his title, and from the same point of view he ignores the
significance of the fall of feudalism, of the spread of knowledge among the
masses, of the new impulses to individualism, of the passion for fame and
the accompanying efforts to acquire all knowledge and culture, and of the
new conception of nobility as based on vertu, or the social worth and moral
force of the individual — aspects that made the age one of real renascence
despite its continuity with the Middle Ages. The educational works of the
early Renaissance, the courtesy books later, and finally the treatises on
special subjects like criticism and morals — barely touched upon by Mr.
Taylor — represent a new contribution to thought even though based on the
classics, and a new idealism that inspired much of the creative literature of
the age and is constantly reflected in it. Hence the excellent sketches given
of Spenser, Shakespeare, and their fellows would be more significant, at least
for this work, if they were more closely related to the movements of con-
temporary thought. Again, a fuller and more sympathetic treatment of the
ideals for reforming the church held by men like Colet and Erasmus is
needed to round out the treatment of the religious thought of the period.
For the vital force of the fanatical religious passion in Luther and his fol-
lowers that stirs Mr. Taylor was not, for all of its dynamic quality, so sig-
nificant for English thought and expression in the sixteenth century as was
the humanistic reformer's ideal of the human race perfected through knowl-
edge and reason. The Church of England, despite the constant struggle
of the Puritans to take the helm, was on the whole guided by the humanists,
whose religion, best expressed in the broad liberalism of Hooker, was closely
related to the moral idealism of the great literary men of the century.
Though the author recognizes what he calls the via media in the English
religious movement, he fails to show the essential unity that underlay

506

REVIEWS AND NOTICES

171

the educational, cultural, religious, and literary movements in the England
of Elizabeth, in spite of the chaotic forms of their expression and the increas-
ing vehemence of the Puritan utterance.

For the background of the Reformation an able and important study is
found in Miss Margaret Deanesly's The Lollard Bible and Other Medieval
Biblical Versions (Cambridge, At the University Press, 1920). Starting
from Sir Thomas More's statement of the liberal attitude of the Catholic
church toward the translation and study of the Bible, she reviews the history
of Bible translation and study on the Continent from the twelfth century
to Luther, and then devotes the major part of her volume to a similar survey
for England from the Anglo-Saxon period to Tyndale, dealing with the
education of the various classes of the clergy before Wycliffe, with the history
of the Lollard movement, especially in relation to the Bible, and with the
reading of the Bible among both the Lollards and the orthodox in the fifteenth
century. Miss Deanesly has not only made a valuable study of the long
preparation for the Reformation, but in her fresh investigation of the general
state of culture from Chaucer to Tyndale she has thrown some light on the
educational and social condition of England in the period of preparation
for the Renaissance.

La Controverse de Martin Marprelate, 1588-1590 (Geneva: A. Jullien,
1916), by G. Bonnard, whether correct or not in all the details of its treat-
ment of a vexed field, is a succinct and clear account, liberally documented,
of the origin and progress of the Marprelate controversy. Starting with
the theory that Throckmorton was the author of all the Martin tracts (see
Appendix A for the argument), M. Bonnard follows the history of their
production and of the replies of the anti-Martinists. The book closes with
bibliographies of legal documents, of controversial tracts in chronological
order, and of modern works bearing on the subject.

Among the works devoted to the poets and poetry of the period, an
unusually important one is Frederick Morgan Padelford's edition of The
Poems of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey recently published as the first of
the University of Washington Publications in Language and Literature.
The poems, classified according to subject-matter, include Tottel's text of
Surrey's translation of the second and fourth books of the Mneid, and also the
text of the fourth book from Hargrave MS 205. The critical material consists
of a full sketch of Surrey's life, an estimate of his contribution to English
verse, textual notes, critical notes dealing in detail with sources, bibliography,
and glossary. All of this material is skilfully condensed, and the edition
bears the marks of careful workmanship. It should long remain standard.
Unfortunately there is some evidence in the notes especially of the crude
work of a provincial typesetter. How far this affects the trustworthiness
of the text I have not been able to determine.

In Douglas' Mneid (Cambridge, At the University Press, 1920) Lauch-
lan M. Watt studies the medieval and Renaissance influences that guided

507

172 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

Douglas his place and influence in the Renaissance, the nature of his trans-
lation, the history of his text, etc. The book is valuable for its survey of
the early Renaissance in Scotland, one of the most important features of
which was Douglas' attempt to make the Latin epic live again in Scottish
vernacular poetry. Here he was hi advance of the English poets, and he
influenced Surrey's similar attempt for England. The subject, however,
needs to be handled in a more exhaustive and constructive fashion than
Mr. Watt has handled it, in spite of the fact that much of his material is
telling and fresh. An adequate account of literary theory and practice in
Scotland around 1500, of the extent to which it molded Douglas, and of the
extent to which he contributed to the Renaissance in Scotland and England,
will make one of the important chapters in the history of the early
Renaissance.

Significance of another sort is attached to Hyder E. Rollins' volume of
Old English Ballads, 1553-1625 (Cambridge, At the University Press, 1920)
in which are printed seventy-five ballads of the broadside type taken chiefly
from manuscripts (especially from Add. MS 15225 and Sloane MS 1896 of
the British Museum) and representing the uninspired muse of the religious
controversies belonging to the middle of the sixteenth century. On the
whole the ballads are inferior to most collections of broadsides that have
been published, but their historical importance is considerable because the
greater part of them represent uniquely the Catholic point of view. The
introduction to the volume and the accounts prefixed to the separate ballads
add greatly to the value of the book.

In English Madrigal Verse 1588-1632 (Oxford, At the Clarendon Press,
1920) Edmund H. Fellowes brings together practically all of the verse pub-
lished in the song books belonging to the end of the sixteenth century and the
$£fpning of the seventeenth, when the excellence of music in England stimu-
lated the production of a large body of song, much of it in the best vein of the
Elizabethan and Jacobean lyric. Some of the verse in these song books is
taken from the works of well-known poets; some of the rest for its excellence
has been made accessible in one way or another and so is familiar; but a
large body of fine poetry is here put within our reach for the first time. We
are fortunate in having the material collected in a single volume so that it
may be judged as a whole. Unfortunately Morley's First Booke of Aires
was inaccessible to Mr. Fellowes (p. xx), and a keener regret will be felt by a
large number of students of Elizabethan literature that he chose to omit all
of Ravenscroft's volumes except A Brief e Discourse, on the ground that they
are composed of rounds and folk-songs. The color of folk-song runs through
many of the song books, and on that account alone Ravenscrof t is needed to
complete the collection even if he cannot be put definitely with one of the
two classes — madrigalists and lutenists — into which Mr. Fellowes divides
the song writers.

508

REVIEWS AND NOTICES

173

Still another phase of the poetry of the period around 1600 receives atten-
tion in The Satire of John Marston (Columbus, Ohio, 1920), by Morse S.
Allen. This work is concerned with the personal satire arising from Mars-
ton's literary quarrels and with the satire directed against aspects of con-
temporary life and manners to be found in the plays as well as in the formal
satires. There is basis for disagreement with the author in a number of
details, especially on the treacherous ground of the literary quarrels or in his
assignment of parts to the separate authors of a joint play or a revised play
like Histriomastix. But the treatment as a whole, with its conservative
handling of the quarrels of Marston and its full analysis of the range of his
satire, furnishes a satisfactory sketch of the work of one of the most pictur-
esque figures in a revolutionary decade.

In the field of the drama a notable general study is English Pageantry,
An Historical Outline, by Robert Withington, in two sumptuous volumes
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918 and 1920). The numerous
works devoted to the history of English drama or to types of dramatic
literature have given a subordinate place to the pageant as a type, usually
treating it as an embryonic form of the masque. This has been due to the
fact that pageants are dependent on action and spectacle for their interest
while the study of dramatic forms has been undertaken almost invariably
from the point of view of literature. Professor Withington treats pageantry
as a relatively distinct art with a distinct function in community life, and
gives our first adequate history of English pageantry from its dim beginnings
in the Middle Ages to the most finished modern efforts in communities of
England and America. Following brief surveys, first, of the element of
pageant to be found in games and processions of medieval festivals, and,
second, of early tournaments, disguisings, and masques as related to pageants,
an attempt is made to present fully the history of the "Royal Entry" in
England from the end of the thirteenth century to the opening of the nine-
teenth, and of the most important form of civic pageant — the Lord Mayor's
Show of London. These sections on the Royal Entry and the Lord Mayor's
Show contain much fresh material and obviously are intended to include
all available records, especially for the period down to the end of the seven-
teenth century. The final section deals with "Survivals and Revivals,"
"The Parkerian Pageant," which the author considers the important modern
movement in the field, and "Pageantry in the United States." An excellent
bibliography and an exceptionally full index are provided. I have noted
several omissions of important accounts of pageantry in the Renaissance,
as for example, the account of the elaborate "midsummer pageants of 1521
in London given in the Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, 1520-6, pp. 136-37,
and that of the pageants presented before Queen Anne in 1613 at Wells,
Journal of the British Archaeological Association, XVI, 318-21. But Pro-
fessor Withington's work is worthy of high commendation for its fresh

509

174 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

contributions to the subject, for its survey of a large field, and for its interpre-
tation of the pageant as a distinct type combining two art forms.

Among new editions of plays is the edition by Franck L. Schoell under
the title Charlemagne (Princeton University Press, 1920) of the play from
Egerton MS 1994 which Bullen edited as The Distracted Emperor. The
purpose is to give a more correct text than the earlier one and to establish
the authorship of Chapman which was suggested by Bullen. The account
of Chapman's knowledge of Petrarch, whose Epistolae furnished the basis
for Charlemagne, the excellent analysis of the style of the drama, and the
pointing of numerous parallels between it and plays accepted in the Chap-
man canon make the ascription seem more than plausible. There is still a
possibility, however, that the crudeness of the play, which is partly respon-
sible for Professor Schoell's assigning the date 1598-99, is due to its having
been written by an imitator of Chapman. In view of this it seems strange
that verse tests were considered of so little value in comparison with tests of
style and parallel passages that they are simply referred to as supporting
the argument for Chapman's authorship and for the date assigned (p. 15).
The matter should have been elaborated, for every possible bit of evidence is
needed to establish the authorship of a play in a period like the Elizabethan
when there was a free use of plots and incidents and a constant borrowing
of aphorisms and striking poetic passages.

Two worthy examples of the modern college dissertation are the edition
of Jonson's Catiline His Conspiracy in the Yale Studies in English (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1916), by Lynn H. Harris, from the text of
the 1616 Folio of Jonson's works, and that of Massinger and Field's Fatal
Dowry (Lancaster, Pa., 1918), a Princeton dissertation, by Charles L.
Lockert, Jr., from the text of the early quarto, 1632. In the careful repro-
duction of the original texts with variant readings, in the study of such
aspects of^ the history of the plays as date and source — and in the case of the
Fatal Dowry the distribution of parts to joint authors — and in annotation,
especially in indicating Jonson's constant classical borrowing, the editors
have apparently done their tasks well. Both volumes will be welcomed as
books of reference for the student of the Elizabethan drama.

Books on Shakespeare continue to multiply. An edition of his works
is well advanced in "The Yale Shakespeare" published by the Yale Uni-
versity Press in a series of neat volumes, each given to a single play or other
work edited by a member of the English faculty of Yale. The edition is a
very practical one for students or libraries. The text with glossarial notes
at the bottom of the pages comes first. Brief explanatory notes follow.
The material dealing with sources of the plays, history of the text, etc., is
usually given in appendixes at the end, which present in succinct form the
established facts or generally accepted theories. In some cases, like Tucker

510

REVIEWS AND NOTICES

175

Brooke's edition of / Henry VI or S. T. Williams' edition of Timon, prob-
lems of source, authorship, etc., are treated somewhat more fully. A brief
bibliography and an index conclude each volume.

Students of Shakespeare generally will welcome the reissue of so impor-
tant a volume on the history of Shakespeare's text as Mr. Alfred W.
Pollard's Shakespeare's Fight with the Pirates and the Problems of the Trans-
mission of His Text (Cambridge, At the University Press, 1920), which is
now out of print in its first form. Mr. Pollard argues that "the Quartos
regularly entered on the Registers of the Stationers' Company were neither
stolen nor surreptitious," and has brought together "some little evidence that
some at least of these editions may have been set up from Shakespeare's
autograph manuscript" (p. 104). An introduction added in the new edition
reviews the critical literature of the last ten or twelve years — much of it from
Mr. Pollard's own pen — which has contributed new facts or new approaches
to the study of the problems of Shakespeare's text. The book inaugurates a
projected series by Mr. Pollard and Mr. J. Dover Wilson entitled "Shake-
speare Problems."

Ludwig Tieck's Buch uber Shakespeare (Halle: Niemeyer, 1920), the first
of Neudrucke Deutscher Literaturwerke des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, is
edited by H. Ltideke from manuscripts, with an introduction telling the
story of Tieck's unrealized plans for a work of broad scope on Shakespeare.
The various manuscripts, given here more fully than before, comprise notes
made on Shakespeare's plays at the end of the eighteenth century — these
cover 364 printed pages — several short collections of miscellaneous notes,
including translations of scenes from English plays, Tieck's account of the
plan for his book, and the two experimental chapters of an introduction
written about 1815. The interest of the work is now almost altogether
historical, and its chief value lies in the light it throws on Tieck rather
than on Shakespeare.

In The Position of the "Roode en Witte jRoos" in the Saga of King Richard
III (University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, Madi-
son, 1919), Oscar J. Campbell prints from the Amsterdam edition of 1651
the Dutch play of Lambert van den Bos studied here, together with an
English translation running at the bottom of the pages. In his introduction
the editor presents detailed evidence to show that van den Bos, who
translated a number of English works into Dutch, did not base1 his play on
the chronicles or on Shakespeare, but had apparently some dramatic source
as a result of which the play "shows resemblances to each of the extant
Richard III plays — Richardus Tertius, The True Tragedie of Richard the
third, and Shakespeare's Richard HI — in respects in which they differ from
each other and from the Chronicle sources" (p. 19). Further he argues
that Shakespeare must "have known and used [the lost play], now and then,

511

176 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

to point material which he derived largely from Holinshed" (p. 57). While
the evidence is not overwhelming, it is sufficient to make quite plausible
the theory that the Dutch version reflects a lost play used by Shakespeare.

Elmer Edgar StolPs Hamlet: An Historical and Comparative Study
(Research Publications of the University of Minnesota, Studies in Language
and Literature, September, 1919) interprets the character of Hamlet in the
light of tradition and of Elizabethan conventions as that of a man of reso-
lution and reserve, well-poised, and bent on action. The study reflects a
mind stored with knowledge of Shakespeare and Elizabethan literature
generally, and hence is instructive and stimulating throughout. But the
interpretation seems to me incorrect and the line of argument fallacious,
despite the truth of much of the detail. For Professor Stoll, as I see it,
would deny meaning to many a passage of Hamlet like "lapsed in time and
passion" (III, iv, 107) and the speeches on suicide (I, ii, 129 ff., and III,
i, 56 ff.), and for the text of Shakespeare as a basis of interpretation would
substitute guesses as to what might be the correct stage-action by which the
true Elizabethan conception of Hamlet could be determined. Every inter-
pretation of the character, however, is a challenge to students of the problem,
and we must give the author credit for a stout championship of the sturdy
Hamlet of his conception.

In The First Quarto of Shakespeare's Hamlet (University of Wisconsin
Studies in Language and Literature, Madison, 1920) Frank G. Hubbard
attempts to establish the fact that the First Quarto of Hamlet is not a
pirated and garbled text but a complete copy of a consistent and effective
version of the play (p. 32), which has been regarded too much in the light
of the Second Quarto. His introduction sets forth this theory, based prin-
cipally on the argument that the errors of the text are not of an extent and
type unusual in Elizabethan printing. A modernized text of Qi is given with
the errors corrected and the lines rearranged to indicate the true metrical
lines, the present readings and arrangements of Qi being indicated in the
footnotes. In presenting the case for the First Quarto in its best light,
Professor Hubbard has made a valuable contribution toward the solution of
one of the problems of Hamlet, but he can hardly be regarded as having
solved it.

C. R. BASKERVILL
UNIVERSITY OP CHICAGO

512

Modern Philology

VOLUME XVIII February IQ2I NUMBER 10

PACT AND WAGER IN GOETHE'S FAUST

It is the purpose of this investigation1 to examine in their inter-
relation, the three fundamental passages of Goethe's Faust which
deal directly with the terms of the agreements entered into by the
Lord, Mephistopheles, and Faust.

The passages in question2 are found in the Prologue in Heaven
(especially 11. 312-43), in the so-called Pact Scene in Studierzimmer II
(11. 1635-1775, and more specifically 1692-1706), and in the Death
Scene in Grosser Vorhof des Palastes (especially 11. 11573-95). They
belong therefore to portions of the drama of which it is generally
assumed that they date from the important third period of Goethe's
activity on Faust, from June, 1797, to April, 1801, to which Goethe
in old age refers as "die beste Zeit," when, aided by Schiller's
encouragement and counsel, he again took up in earnest the work
previously done and for a while even seemed to hope to be able to
complete the entire drama.3

1 An outline of the salient points of this paper was presented orally at the annual
meeting of the Modern Language Association at Columbus, Ohio, in December, 1919.
For the sake of remaining within the limits of the available space, the paper as here
printed has been somewhat condensed.

2 Quotations and references follow the text of the Weimar edition.

» Only a few days before sending my manuscript to the printer I have received
Die Entstehungsgeschichte des Goetheschen Faust by Chr. Sarauw (Copenhagen, 1918;
"Det Kgl. Danske Videnskabernes Selskab. Historisk-fllologiske Meddelelser," I, 7.),
of which I had previously seen Robert Petsch's extensive review, largely of assent, in
Germ.-Rom. Monatsschrift, VIII (1920), 144-52. A necessarily hasty examination of
Sarauw's arguments, of which I gladly admit that many are helpful and valuable, has
however quite failed to convince me that practically the whole of the Pact Scene was
513] 113 [MODEEN PHILOLOGY, February, 1921

114 , A. R. HOHLFELD

At that time (June 22, 1797), in an often quoted letter to Schiller,
Goethe states that he is thinking over, first of all, the general "plan"
or "idea" underlying the work.

Nun habe ich eben diese Idee und deren Darstellung wieder vorgenommen
und bin mit mir selbst ziemlich einig.

Nevertheless he asks Schiller for suggestions on this point, and his
more philosophically minded friend does not fail, in his reply of the
very next day, to lay all possible emphasis on the necessity of bring-
ing out clearly the central idea demanded by what he conceives to
be the "symbolic significance" of the work as a whole.

Kurz, die Anf order ungen an den "Faust" sind zugleich philosophisch
und poetisch, und Sie mogen sich wenden, wie Sie wollen, so wird Ihnen die
Natur des Gegenstandes eine philosophische Behandlung auflegen, und die
Einbildungskraft wird sich zum Dienst einer Vernunftidee bequemen
mtissen.

In a subsequent letter of June 26, Schiller reverts to this point,

stating,

dass mir der "Faust" seiner Anlage nach auch eine Totalitat der Materie

nach zu erfodern scheint, wenn am Ende die Idee ausgefuhrt erscheinen

soil, und fur eine so hoch aufquellende Masse finde ich keinen poetischen

Reif, der sie zusammenhalt. Nun, Sie werden sich schon zu helfen wissen.

Goethe, in his responses of June 24 and 27, is somewhat reserved
in his references to his friend's suggestions. He points to the
peculiarities of his own creative procedure so different from that of
Schiller. Nevertheless he says,
Wir werden wohl in der Ansicht dieses Werkes nicht variiren,

and again,

Ihre Bemerkungen zu "Faust" waren mir sehr erfreulich. Sie treffen, wie
es natiirlich war, mit meinen Vorsatzen und Planen recht gut zusammen,
nur dass ich .... die hochsten Forderungen mehr zu beriihren als zu
erfullen denke.

written in Rome in 1788, and that therefore the crucial passage from 1. 1635 to 1. 1769,
which does not yet appear in the Fragment, is "aus einem Gusse" with what follows from
1. 1770 to the beginning of the Schiilerszene.

Vol. VIII of the Jahrbuch der Goethe-Gesellschaft, which is reported to contain an
article by Otto Pniower on " Der Teufelspakt im Faust," I have not been able to secure
to date (January 4, 1921).

514

PACT AND WAGER IN GOETHE'S "FAUST"

115

As a matter of fact it is interesting to note that during the first
year of the period of productivity which sets in with this exchange
of views Goethe repeatedly makes reference, in letters and diary, to
skeleton outlines and other devices (" Schema," "Ubersicht") for
the organization of the work as a whole1 until finally, presumably
some time in the latter part of 1799 or early in 1800, he draws up
the much discussed " Schema," "Ideales Streben nach Einwirken
und Einfuhlen in die ganze Natur," etc.2 During this period from
1797 to 1801 and most probably during the twelve months from
April, 1800, to April, 1801, Goethe finishes the Prologue in Heaven,
closes up the "grosse Liicke," which includes the Pact Scene between
Faust and Mephistopheles, and writes at least a first draft of the
closing scenes of Faust's earthly career, in which the outcome of
the wager was bound to be an element of prime consideration.3
Hence, in a relatively short period of time and under a creative
impulse that distinctly sets out from the conscious endeavor of
bringing coherence and a certain unity of purpose into what already
existed and what was now being planned, the three scenes that con-
cern us here are composed.

This is a matter of considerable importance. For if, in the face
of this state of things, we were to find puzzling obscurities or even
flat contradictions between the wager in heaven, the pact on earth,
and the final settlement of both at the time of Faust's death, or,
worse yet, within the stipulations and details of any one of the
three passages taken by itself, we cannot lay such defects to con-
flicting plans prevailing at widely separated periods of composition
and a certain cavalier indifference in regard to making the necessary
adjustments. On the contrary, we are charging Goethe, and that
the Goethe of Hermann und Dorothea and Die naturliche Tochter,
with the inability to think straight or to express himself clearly in

i Cf. H. G. Graf: Goethe -fiber seine Dichtungen, II, 2, Nos. 908, 918, and 942.

* Of. Graf, loc. cit., No. 949.

» The fact that the final form of the third passage (11. 11573 fl.) is apparently of
very late origin will be discussed later (see below, p. 133) . As the changes then made do
not introduce, however, any disturbing elements, but render the poet's previous intention
only clearer and the coherence with the other two passages only closer, all three can.
for the purposes of this investigation, be considered synchronous to the extent indicated
above. Cf. the conversation with Boisseree of August 3, 1815 (Graf, No. 1162).

515

116 A. R. HOHLFELD

a deliberate effort to provide a central framework on which the
rambling superstructure was to be assembled and completed.1

Nevertheless, the many and widely different interpretations
which have been advanced, not only of the problem as a whole,
but even of almost every conceivable detailed feature of it, are
positively bewildering. Consolation, if any, in regard to the validity
and usefulness of the vast amount of critical — and uncritical — effort
expended can only be found in the fact that in the most substantial
and comprehensive of recent commentaries there is a definite trend
toward at least approximate agreement on the more important points
and wider acceptance of the idea of essential consistency and unity.2

A. THE PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN

(Lines 312-43)

The principal questions which have been raised in regard to
this passage are the following :

1. Does the Lord actually accept the wager which Mephistopheles
offers?

2. If he does, does not his omniscience invalidate the entire
situation ?

1 This statement applies, of course, only to the three passages here under discussion
and the new plan underlying them. That there are incompatibilities between this plan
and certain passages which originated under the older conception, cannot be denied, I
believe. Minor disturbances are created by passages, as e.g., lines 2635-38, which clearly
point to the older plan but also yield to a reasonable interpretation according to the new
idea. The passages which however create the greatest difficulty are the immediate
continuation of the Pact Scene, especially lines 1770-1815, and Mephistopheles' mono-
logue preceding the scene with the Student (11. 1851-67), both of which appeared in the
Fragment at a time when the Pact Scene proper did not yet exist. Sarauw, according
to his theory of Italian origin for the Pact Scene (see above, p.J113), is obliged to attempt
a unitary interpretation of the entire text from 1635 to 1867, but while he makes observa-
tions on Mephistopheles' monologue which deserve careful consideration, he fails to
clear away, or even to recognize, the apparent difficulties in lines 1770-1815, or more
especially 1803-5 and 1810-15. Niejahr's careful, though to my mind hyper-analytic
discussion of the Pact Scene in Vol. XX of the Jahrbuch is not referred to by Sarauw,
either directly or indirectly.

2 The sanest and on the whole most convincing opinions are those expressed by Erich
Schmidt and Georg Witkowski in the introduction and notes of their respective annotated
editions of Faust ("Jubilaums-Ausgabe" and Hesse und Becker), though neither of them
treats the question connectedly or at length, and by Georg Miiller in his interesting book,
Das Recht in Goethes Faust (Berlin, 1912, 372 pages), which, despite its often discursive
presentation of unrelated legal erudition, has many excellent qualities and certainly
deserves a more generous reception by the regular guild of Faust critics than has been
accorded it by Max Morris in Jahresberichte for 1912. With Minor (Goethes Faust, 2
vols., Stuttgart, 1901) I totally disagree in his interpretation of the wager between Faust
and Mephistopheles, though his analysis of the scene in heaven is the best I know.
Our American editions by Thomas and Goebel pay but little attention to the problem.

516

PACT AND WAGER IN GOETHE'S "FAUST" 117

3. Which are the opposing contentions of the two contracting
parties ?

4. Is it Faust's eternal soul that is at stake or do lines 315-16
preclude any consequences beyond Faust's earthly life ?

1. Does the Lord actually accept the wager which Mephistopheles
offers f — There can be no doubt that Mephistopheles thinks so or
pretends to think so.1 On the other hand, it is equally apparent
that the Lord says nothing which could be construed as the acceptance
of a wager. He merely grants Mephistopheles freedom to play his
role as tempter as best he can, while he declares with calm assurance
that Faust cannot be led astray sufficiently to forget his better
nature or higher aims. He predicts Mephistopheles' failure and
final discomfiture, and is merely willing to let him try his luck. It
is only by common consent that we can speak of a wager in Heaven
between the Lord and Mephistopheles. As a matter of fact, the
Lord with unperturbed reserve declines to descend to the plane of
Mephistopheles' contentiousness.

Those critics are therefore far from the mark who accuse the
Lord of violating the fundamental demands of divine love and justice
by betting about the weal and woe of a human soul. In reality
there is nothing of the kind. In fact, if we look more closely we find
that Mephistopheles merely asks for that which is his traditional
right, although a right which, as he is aware, the Lord may limit
or perhaps even annul in any given case. For when the Lord says:

Des Menschen Thatigkeit kann allzuleicht erschlaffen,

Er liebt sich bald die unbedingte Ruh;

Drum geb' ich gem ihm den Gesellen zu,

Der reizt und wirkt und muss als Teufel schaffen [11. 340-43],

he clearly does not refer to a new or special arrangement, but to an
established practice. In the Lord's plan of salvation such a task
has once for all been assigned to Mephistopheles, and if the latter
(in 11. 313-14) seems to ask for specific permission, it is merely to
make sure, in view of the bet he has offered, that the Lord has not
perchance made different disposition in this case.

The Lord, thus, is far from submitting Faust's destiny to any
unheard-of dangers, still less, of course, to a wanton game of chance;

» Of. 1. 331, even if 1. 312 were taken merely as colloquial swagger.

517

118 A. R. HOHLFELD

as far from doing so as the imperturbably self-assured figure in the
Book of Job. In Faust, the whole scene is in a less austere mood;
it is richer in color and more human in tone, but neither in thought
nor word does Goethe ascribe anything to the figure of the Lord
that is at variance with a lofty conception or essentially reverential
treatment.

2. Does not the Lord's omniscience invalidate the entire situation f —
It has been urged repeatedly that inasmuch as the Lord knows the
ultimate outcome with absolute certainty, it is neither fair for him
to accept a wager, nor is there that modicum of uncertainty without
which there can be no genuine dramatic suspense.

The foregoing discussion has practically furnished the answer to
the former of the two objections. Moreover, the Lord's omniscience
is certainly not supposed to be unknown to Mephistopheles, nor is
the Lord making any concealment of what he foresees as the future
result, nor trying to take advantage of Mephistopheles' blind eager-
ness. Aside from the humiliation of having to acknowledge his
wrong (1. 327) the latter is not threatened by any further harm or
danger in case he loses his wager. His efforts will have been in
vain: that is all. There surely is no reason for us to worry about
his being subjected to anything like unfair treatment.

The second question, whether the Lord's prophecy of the out-
come, coupled with his omniscience, does not invalidate the idea of a
struggle with a doubtful issue, would surely have to be answered in
the affirmative if we were dealing with a philosophical treatise
addressing itself to cold reason and not with a work of poetry making
its primary appeal to the imagination and the emotions. The real
question therefore is whether or no the poet's art succeeds in putting
the reader under the transitory spell of its power of suggestion. At
any rate, Goethe has carefully avoided reminding us, in the chants
of the angels or in the introductory remarks of Mephistopheles, of
the Lord's omniscience; Mephistopheles, we feel, has been successful
in many a previous venture; and he shows himself to be not only
undismayed, but confident of victory. So despite our reason, we
may well tremble at the thought of his craftiness, of the promised
non-interference of the Lord, and of human frailty.

3. Which are the opposing contentions of the contracting parties f —
Only general expressions are used by both the Lord and Mephis-

518

PACT AND WAGER IN GOETHE'S "FAUST" 119

topheles to denote what they expect Faust's conduct to be, although
it is perfectly clear that what the one hopes to accomplish is the
irreconcilable opposite of what the other is looking forward to.
The Lord, who speaks of Faust as his servant, admits that his
present service shows him still in a state of confusion, but predicts
that clear vision and good fruits will appear in time, and even
though like all men who "strive" Faust will continue to be subject
to "error," he will not lose his moral autonomy, but like all truly
"good" men, he will remain conscious of the right road even when
groping in the dark. Thus Mephistopheles will not be able to
draw him away from his original source in order to lead him down-
ward along his path. This, whatever it may mean in detail, is
clearly what Mephistopheles feels sure he can do. He is, however,
far less explicit than the Lord and makes only one attempt to define
his object, when he declares:

Staub soil er fressen, und mit Lust [1. 334].

Here "Staub" plainly implies the strongest possible contrast to
"Urquell," things low, coarse, and deadening. On them Faust is to
feed and he is to do it with pleasure.

What, however, is perfectly clear is that no occasional individual
act is to decide, but that both the Lord and Mephistopheles are
referring to the formation of character or habit, to a permanent
state of soul from which conduct will flow of necessity. What the
Lord has in mind is spoken of as "Streben"; it is to lead to "Klar-
heit," "Bliite," "Frucht," which perhaps without undue straining
may be paraphrased as das Wahre, Schone, Gute. To this Mephis-
topheles' program stands diametrically opposed.

4. Is it the fate of Faust's soul after death that is at stake f— Despite
the fact that a natural reading of the scene as a whole clearly sug-
gests an affirmative answer, a number of well-known critics have
stoutly maintained the opposite. They base their opinion on two
considerations: first, the contention that the Lord's fatherly love
and sense of justice would prevent his making the eternal welfare
of a human soul dependent on a wager; and, second, the ostensible
restriction of Mephistopheles to Faust's life on earth, contained in
the words of the Lord,

So lang er auf der Erde lebt,
So lange sei dir's nicht verboten [11. 315-16],
519

120 • A. R. HOHLFELD

and in Mephistopheles' rejoinder that he is interested in men only
as long as they are alive.

The first of these two arguments, as has been shown above
(see p. 117), is based on a misconception. Let us see whether the
second carries more weight.

In the two lines just quoted all commentators, as far as I know,
see a limitation of Mephistopheles' efforts to Faust's earthly life
and overlook completely that there would really be no sense to such
a stipulation. Where do we learn — in Bible, legend, or popular
tradition — that the power of the devil to tempt and, if possible,
seduce a man does not eo ipso end with his life on earth ? God's
decision on his ultimate fate — salvation or damnation — belongs to
the hereafter, but the record on which that final decision will rest
is closed with the end of man's existence on earth. Even where a
purgatory is thought of, which is not the case in Goethe's drama,
the spirits of evil have no longer any power to lead the soul into new
error after death.1 It is clear that the traditional explanation of
the lines in question should be abandoned. Not a limitation is
expressed, but on the contrary widest possible latitude. Line 315,
which is generally read with the emphasis on "Erde," has its chief
stress on "So lang." Mephistopheles has asked for permission to
lead Faust along his road and by the use of "sacht" ("Ihn meine
Strasse sacht zu fiihren"; 1. 314) has indicated that even he realizes
it will have to be done cautiously and will require time. If limited
to a short period, he implies, it would not be a fair test. Hence the
Lord, assuring him that he will have the fullest opportunity to try
his skill, replies:

So lang er auf der Efde le"bt,

So lange sei dir's nicht verb6ten [11. 315-16].

Thus interpreted the two lines not only gain a logical and forceful
connection with what precedes; they also appear far more organi-
cally linked with the famous line following :

Es irrt der Mensch so lang er strebt [1. 317].

1 Minor is clearly conscious of the superfluity, not to say meaninglessness, of such
a limitation ("Mephistopheles findet die Bedingung ganz selbstverstandlich und ganz
allgemein, nicht bloss fur Faust, giltig") but he too cannot rid himself of the idea that
a limitation is expressed. Cf. Goethes Faust, 2, 91-93.

520

PACT AND WAGER IN GOETHE'S " FAUST" 121

For if error is inevitable as long as there is striving, then Mephis-
topheles may claim to have a chance of seducing his victim as long
as death has not yet put him automatically beyond the danger of
further temptation.

Another group of critics go, however, still farther and construe
the terrestrial limitation which they see in lines 315-16 as fore-
ordaining the ultimate failure of Mephistopheles' efforts and Faust's
rescue from his power after death.1 This is an even greater mis-
conception, not borne out by anything expressed or implied in the
text itself. For even if the lines in question were to be interpreted
as stipulating a limitation, this limitation would clearly refer to the
efforts of temptation only, not to the subsequent result. If it is
asserted that the Prologue in Heaven absolutely predicts Goethe's
intention of saving his hero, the claim must rest on the predictions
of the Lord in lines 309 ff. and 327 ff., interpreted in the light of his
omniscience and Mephistopheles' subordinate relation, not however
on lines 315-16.

But what, then, has been asked by some, is the meaning of
Mephistopheles' statement that his interest in men expires with
death,

Da dank' ich euch; denn mit den Todten

Hab' ich mich niemals gern befangen [11. 318-19] ?

Does this not prove that the Mephistopheles of the Prologue — what-
ever may have been Goethe's plans before or after — is merely a
terrestrial teaser and tempter, a "Sehalk," who does not even aim
to reach out beyond man's life on earth, and that so much the
more as the Prologue contains no direct reference to hell? As a
matter of fact, the lines offer not the least difficulty to a natural
interpretation. If Mephistopheles is a tempter and seducer of men
on earth, he can play his r61e as such with the hope of success only
as long as they are living. The dead, as we have seen, are beyond
his reach. But it should hardly be necessary to point out that the
case is entirely different where he has been successful or believes
he is going to be. The very comparison which he makes between

1 Some who do not go so far admit nevertheless, as e.g., Goebel in his edition of the
First Part of Faust (New York, 1907, p. 262), "the implication of these lines that
Mephistopheles is to have no claim on Faust in the life hereafter." As a matter of
fact, not even such an implication exists.

521

122 'A. R. HOHLFELD

himself in his relation to his victim and a cat playing with a mouse
(cf. 11. 321-22) should be convincing enough. The cat may spurn
a dead mouse, but it tries to catch a live one, not to let it run again,
but to devour.

No other assumption tallies, moreover, with a natural and
unforced interpretation of expressions like the following, some of
which are used by Mephistopheles and others by the Lord,

.... den sollt ihr noch verlieren [1. 312].

Zieh diesen Geist von seinem Urquell ab [1. 324}.

.... fiihr' ihn. . . Auf deinem Wege mit herab [11. 325-26].

Triumph aus voller Brust [1. 333].

Staub soil er fressen, und mit Lust [1. 334].

They certainly cannot refer to temporary error, for that the Lord
has admitted from the start. They evidently refer to at least the
hypothetic possibility of Faust becoming permanently ensnared in
the meshes of Mephistopheles' net. And even if we are prepared
to admit that no wager or pact as such will mechanically decide
Faust's ultimate fate, but that the final decision will rest with the
Lord, our sense of the Lord's unerring justice assures us that if
such a result were to come to pass, he would admit himself defeated
and declare for Mephistopheles and against Faust. If we had not
this assurance there would be no meaning whatever in the poetic
device of a wager, even though only a one-sided wager.

B. THE PACT BETWEEN FAUST AND MESPHISTOPHELES

(Lines 1635-1775)

In regard to this scene, the following problems have given rise
to the most serious differences of opinion:

1. Are the pact offered by Mesphistopheles and the wager offered
by Faust both binding ?

2. If not, why are both Faust and Mephistopheles willing to
change from the contractual agreement to the wager ?

3. Which is the real wager offered and accepted ?

4. Do its terms agree with those underlying the wager in heaven ?
1. Are the pact offered by Mephistopheles and the wager offered

by Faust both binding? — To start with, Mephistopheles offers him-
self to Faust as a companion and eventually servant [11. 1646 ff.], and

522

PACT AND WAGER IN GOETHE'S "FAUST" 123

only when Faust desires to know the conditions of such an asso-
ciation, he proposes the following terms:

Ich will mich hier zu deinem Dienst verbinden,
Auf deinen Wink nicht rasten und nicht ruhn;
Wenn wir uns druben wieder finden,
So sollst du mir das Gleiche thun [11. 1656-59].

That is, he suggests a fixed contractual agreement, based on
the idea of service and wages, and practically identical with the pact
in earlier Faust literature, except that instead of the usual twenty-
four years Mephistopheles stipulates the length of Faust's natural
life as time-limit for his services.1 Aside from this point, there is
nothing in the terms of this pact that corresponds with the stipula-
tions in heaven. On the contrary, the emphasis which there has
been laid on spiritual values as the decisive criteria, plainly suggests
that a mechanical pact of this kind would find no recognition at
the hands of the Lord. Here, for a moment, two entirely different
world-views are in plain sight of each other, and any attempt at
reconciliation of the two is bound to be forced. In passing, as
it were, Goethe here merely pays his respects to one of the time-
honored traditions of the theme, as he has done in numerous instances
elsewhere.2 Incidentally, it may be claimed, he scores a point by
thus placing in strongest possible relief the new idea which underlies
his own conception of the relation of Faust and Mephistopheles.
Faust, in the wild despair that has only just found torrential
expression in the curse he has hurled against everything endearing
life to man (11. 1583-1606), is not averse to such a pact. His unbear-
able sorrows are of this life, and if in Mephistopheles' society some-
how or other he can hope to drown these, he does not care what
may or may not await him in a We to come.
Das Druben kann mich wenig kiimmern;
Schlagst du erst diese Welt zu Triimmern,
Die andre mag darnach entstehn [11. 1660-701.

Everything now points to the immediate conclusion of the pact
as proposed. Nevertheless this does not happen, and the conversa-
tion takes an unexpected turn. The passage which has just been

i Like most critics who discuss at all the meaning of " wenn" in 1. 1658. I take it as
temporal, not conditional. Cf., however, Lichtenberger, Le Faust de Ooethe, 1911, p. 49.
* Cf. e.g., the signing of a document with Faust's blood.

523

124 ' A. R. HOHLFELD

quoted in part is clearly not construed by Mephistopheles as an
acceptance, for after Faust has finished speaking, Mephistopheles
is still urging him to accept :

In diesem Sinne kanst du's wagen.

Verbinde dich; .... [11. 1671-72].

After these words, however, it is distinctly only the wager offered
by Faust that both, with due formality, agree to. The pact is no
longer mentioned. It has given way to, or better perhaps, it has
been merged into a wager. I prefer to say it has been merged or
transformed into a wager because the basic conditions of the pact
— service on the part of Mephistopheles and Faust's soul as payment
therefor — are taken over as the stakes into the wager offered by
Faust.1

A further objection against the assumption, championed by
Minor,2 that the pact and the wager both stand, the latter as a sort
of codicil to the former, lies in the fact that such an agreement would
not be a wager. It would be far less of a wager than the one-sided
one between the Lord and Mephistopheles. There Mephistopheles
at any rate — and he alone is concerned — sees things in terms of a
wager: "Both of us covet Faust's soul. If I can accomplish what
I claim, I'll get it. If things turn out as you claim they will, you'll
have it." But Faust's offer to Mephistopheles would simply run
thus: "If you succeed in satisfying me through your gifts you can
have my soul at once. If you fail — you'll get it a little later."
A "wager" with anything like a balancing of advantage and disad-
vantage in the case of winning or losing requires the agreement to'
read as follows: "You offer your services, which you claim can
make me forget the misery of life. I offer my soul after death. If
you succeed, you win my soul; in fact you may then have it at once.
Rather hell than a life as slave of your worthless and degrading
pleasures. If I prevail, however, I'll remain free and you will have
had your services for naught."

It is clear, then, the assumption of the validity of the pact
creates difficulties and incongruities of all sorts. It contradicts the
spirit and purpose of the whole Prologue in Heaven and connects
up with absolutely nothing at the end of Faust's life. Goethe in his

» The " Dienst" mentioned in 1. 1704 reverts to that of 11. 1656-57, and the " Fesseln"
of 1. 1701 correspond to 11. 1658-59.

2 Goethes Faust, 2, 194-95.

524

PACT AND WAGER IN GOETHE'S "FAUST" 125

later utterances on Faust's fate never so much as refers to it, but
only speaks of the wager.1 Nevertheless we should, of course, have
to admit its existence and make the best of it, if a natural reading
or a searching analysis of the text required it. But when exactly
the opposite is the case and violence has to be done to the text to
establish the pact as binding, common sense would suggest that we
trouble no further about it.

2. Why are both Faust and Mephistopheles willing to change from
the pact to the wager f — It is with admirable skill that Goethe in
thirty-two short lines (1660-91), assigning only two speeches to
each of the two characters, brings about the transition from the
traditional contract to the fundamentally different wager. This
success is so much the more noteworthy since in such a situation a
change in the terms proposed by one party is likely to be objected
to as disadvantageous by the other. Nevertheless the motivation
for the behavior of both Faust and Mephistopheles is surprisingly
natural and logical.

Either of them is entitled to believe that he is gaming a decided
advantage by the change from the pact to wager; and if it must be
admitted that Faust is in too reckless a mood to care for relative
advantages or disadvantages and does not act consciously from
such impulses, then it is the inherent soundness of his nature which
instinctively makes him shape matters in accordance with the
dictates of his being.

As for Faust, it is true, his ruin, which otherwise would be post-
poned to the end of his life, may come very soon. But if so, it will
only shorten what is to him a well-nigh unbearable existence and,
moreover, it must commend itself to his sense of right and fitness.
In that case he knows he deserves no better. "Wie ich beharre
bin ich Knecht, Ob dein, was frag' ich, oder wessen" (11. 1710-11).
On the other hand, it is his conviction — and on that his wager rests
— that such a surrender of his true nature to the temptations of a
Mephistopheles will never come.

Mephistopheles, on the other hand, no less considers the change
to his advantage. Confident that he can accomplish what Faust

i In a conversation with Boissere"e of August 3, 1815( Graf, No. 1162), Goethe, in
reply to Boisser6e's statement that he expects the devil to be worsted in the end, makes
the significant remark, "Faust macht im Anfang dem Teufel eine Bedingung, woraus
Alles folgt." This "condition" can be only the wager offered in 11. 1692ff.; and if
"everything" develops from it, the pact as such is clearly ruled out.

525

126 A. R. HOHLFELD

declares he will never be able to do — just as cock-sure, as a matter of
fact, as he had been in heaven in his conversation with the Lord —
he believes that he will not have to bother himself in service to
the end of Faust's life, but that his object will be attained much
sooner. That it may not be attained at all is an alternative which
his conceit prevents him from considering.

3. Which is the real wager offered and accepted? — This is the
crucial question of the problem as a whole, and on its right under-
standing, more than on anything else, depends a really satisfactory
answer to the ultimate question whether, at the close of the drama,
Faust has fairly won or lost his wager.

An objective consideration of what is the real content of the
wager which Faust offers and Mephistopheles accepts has been much
interfered with by the prominence given both in the Pact Scene and
in the Death Scene to those words which, when addressed to the
fleeting moment, are to express delight in what it has brought and
a wish that things might remain as they are. In the Pact Scene,
Faust says to Mephistopheles:

Werd' ich zum Augenblicke sagen:

Verweile doch! du bist so schon!

Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen,

Dann will ich gern zu Grande gehn! .... [11. 1699-1706].

At the very end of his life, in a most significant situation, these fate-
ful words again come from his lips. To most critics it has seemed
perfectly clear, therefore, that, technically or legally at any rate,
Faust loses his wager and that through this very use of the phrase
as a sort of "Leitmotiv" the poet has wished to emphasize what he
himself considered the central content of the wager.

Let us examine the facts. Whoever emphasizes the grave conse-
quences for Faust of the mere repetition of a stated phrase, without
carefully inquiring, first of all, whether the real meaning and purpose
of the words is the same in both instances, whatever else he may be,
is a strict constructionist. Very well, then let him not overlook the
fact that, strictly construed, the passage in question does not belong
to the wager at all. The actual wager, beyond a peradventure of
doubt, is stated in the six preceding lines,

Werd' ich beruhigt je mich auf ein Faulbett legen,
So sei es gleich um mich gethan!

PACT AND WAGER IN GOETHE'S "FAUST" 127

Kannst du mich schmeichelnd je beliigen
Dass ich mir selbst gefallen mag,
Kannst du mich mit Genuss betriigen;
Das sei fur mich der letzte Tag! [11 1692-97].

For Faust's next words, "Die Wette biet' ich," refer clearly to these
words and not to what follows. Mephistopheles does not wait with
his acceptance for any further explanations or additions, but at once
exclaims "Top!" and strikes his right hand into the outstretched right
of Faust, who then with the words, "Und Schlag auf Schlag!" con-
firms the fact that the agreement is complete by letting his left
hand fall on the two clasped hands.1 The wager at this moment
therefore is complete, offered and accepted in due form — and not
one word has been said of "Verweile doch! du bist so schon!" —
certainly an important fact, although to my knowledge nowhere
definitely recognized.2

The application which I myself desire to make of the point which
I have raised is not in the direction of excluding the second passage
from the true content of the wager. My object is, first of all, to
silence the so-called strict constructionists by a somewhat better
application of their own principle. Aside from that, I am quite
prepared to recognize the second passage as a weighty and significant
element of the wager as a whole. Faust clearly feels it as such,
offers it as such, Mephistopheles accepts it, and, in the end, we are
not dealing with a case argued at the bar of law and in keeping with
a technical code, but before the free consciences of thinking and
feeling men, who will not be debarred from pressing to the heart of
a question by undue regard for defects of formal transmission.

But this much should be clear: // the second passage is to be
admitted as substantial evidence it cannot possibly be so admitted
by itself, nor even as the point of chief importance, but only in
intimate connection with the preceding passage, which, after all,
enjoys the advantage of unquestioned legitimacy.

i Thus, most acceptably, though differently from the current interpretation, the
act is described by Minor (Goethes Faust, 2, 194) and Georg Muller (Das Recht in Goethet
Faust, 324).

« In Georg Muller (Das Recht in Goethes Faust, 325) I find an indirect recognition
of the difficulty. He prescribes that the hands must remain clasped at least till line
1706, i.e., at least the outward symbol is to carry its binding effect over into the second

527

128 A. R. HOHLFELD

As soon as this fact is established, the wager cannot possibly be
interpreted, as is so often done, as though it turned on Faust's
unconditional declaration that he would never say to the passing
moment: "Verweile doch! du bist so schon!" and that therefore
he is willing to declare himself defeated if ever, under any circum-
stances, prompted by no matter what emotions, he should voice a
wish for things to remain as they are, for time to stand still.

I readily admit that Faust, who only a few moments before has
uttered his reckless curse, feels that way, and that someone who
really understood him and knew how to lead him on might easily
have driven him to such an all-including wager. Mephistopheles,
however, is not his man. On the contrary, if anything saves Faust
from the danger of such an agreement it is Mephistopheles himself.
Through his crude self-complacency he draws all of Faust's scorn
and indignation upon himself and the things he has to offer. Faust,
as it were, is willing to purchase unseen at a dangerously high price
a parcel of goods that serve his immediate purpose although he is
convinced of their intrinsic worthlessness; but when the salesman
attempts to treat him as a fool by extolling virtues that do not exist,
his connoisseur's pride is stung and his whole attitude toward the
bargain changed. Twice Mephistopheles makes the clumsy attempt:

. . . . du sollst, in diesen Tagen,
Mit Freuden meine Kiinste sehn,
Ich gebe dir was noch kein Mensch gesehn [11. 1672-74] ,

and again :

Doch, guter Freund, die Zeit kommt auch heran

Wo wir was Guts in Ruhe schmausen mogen [11. 1690-91],

and twice Faust voices his contemptuous conviction that in this
sphere there can be for him no talk of joy and contentment; first
with withering scorn (Was willst du armer Teufel geben ....
11. 1675-77), and afterwards in flaming indignation by offering the
wager in place of the pact.

What he asserts in it is that idleness (Faulbett), self-complacency
(Selbstgef alien), and pleasure (Genuss) will never be able to gain
control of him so as to satisfy him. Should they do that, then he
is willing to acknowledge his soul forfeited to Mephistopheles at
once. The three terms clearly characterize the different aspects of

528

PACT AND WAGER IN GOETHE'S "FAUST" 129

a typical case of sensual enslavement and moral degeneracy, with
complete loss of all idealistic striving or "Streben," and it is only
against these things, which to him sum up the promised joys of
Mephistopheles, that Faust sets up his bold denial and wager. If,
therefore, immediately after the handshaking has taken place, he
continues: "Werd' ich zum Augenblicke sagen: Verweile doch! du
bist so schon!" etc., two things seem clear. First, the "moment"
he has in mind is not any moment whatsoever, no matter what its
content might be, but a moment devoted to one or all of the Mephis-
tophelean "good" things whose power over him he has just chal-
lenged; and second, that which prompts him to make the additional
statement is a purely emotional impulse. He does not really want
to say anything new, nor add anything to what he has said. It is
solely a question of intensity. As he often does, he carries that
which is clamoring in him for still extremer utterance to the last
possible point of paradoxical hyperbole. If ever he can succumb to
the allurements of Mephistopheles sufficiently to wish for the fleet-
ing moment to delay, he will be doomed immediately. In the end
it may be well that the words are spoken outside of the formal wager,
for the language of defiant exaltation is rarely helpful in making
contractual stipulations.1

4. Do the terms of the wager on earth agree with those of the wager
in heaven f — I feel convinced that this is the case, and think it can
best be shown by calling attention to what evidently is a logical or
structural device underlying the chief formulas used both in heaven
and earth. In offering his wager, Faust uses three phrases, each of
which consists of two elements :

Faulbett — beruhigt

schmeichelnd beliigen— selbst gefallen

Genuss — betriigen

» The wording of the written document which Faust signs we do not learn. This
point has been strangely insisted upon by Victor Michels in Euphorion 13 (1906), 637 fl.
in arguments which I am not able to follow. Space forbids my entering here upon a
detailed discussion of this question, which is also treated at some length by Georg
Muller in Das Recht in Goethes Faust, p. 331 f. Of course, Mephistopheles might have
tried to get the better of Paust by writing into the bond (unless we assume that Faust
not only signs it but himself writes it) both the pact and the wager, or for that matter
other deviations from the actual agreement. But if so, the poet would have had to
take us into his confidence. His very silence is plain proof that at least for substance of
doctrine the written agreement must be assumed to be identical with the verbal one
of which we have been witnesses.

529

130 ,A. R. HOHLFELD

In each instance there is expressed on the one hand an element of
sensual or emotional temptation, and on the other a spiritual con-
dition, a state of soul which is to be engendered thereby, and it is
perfectly clear that Faust lays the chief emphasis on the latter.

Mephistopheles does not frame any counter-proposition. He
merely accepts the wager. But he has previously attempted some
formulas of his, which show an interesting parallelism with those

used by Faust:

meine Kiinste sehn — mit Freuden

was Guts schmausen — in Ruhe.

Hence, he too is not satisfied with Faust's willingness to accept
what he has to offer, but he too aims at a result which is thereby
to be achieved. And if we go a step farther and examine the one
programmatic formula which in heaven he used in speaking to the

Lord,

Staub soil er fressen — und mit Lust

we find that it tallies exactly with the terms he uses toward Faust
and those used by Faust himself.1 They all denote the same two-
fold idea of indulgence in self-gratification and resultant content-
ment. What varies is merely the moods in which the different
statements are made.

Everything is in perfect agreement, and I have no hesitation,
with Erich Schmidt, to speak of "Beide identische Wetten."2

C. THE DEATH SCENE

(Lines 11573-95)

The following problems will be taken up seriatim, although
everything hinges here on the one question : Who has won the wager ?

1. Does Faust die a natural death, or is his death due to the
fact that he speaks the fatal words, "Verweile doch, du bist so
schon!"?

2. Does Faust win or lose his wager with Mephistophe les ?

3. If he does not lose it through what transpires here at the end
of his life, has he not previously lost it during the progress of the
drama ?

1 Interesting, and perhaps not accidental, is the similarity in form and content of

these formulas with that of the evangelist, " Liebe Seele habe nun Ruhe, iss, trink

und habe guten Mut," in Luke 2, 19-20.

2 Jubilaums-Ausgabe, Vol. XIII, Einleitung, p. xxxii.

530

PACT AND WAGER IN GOETHE'S "FAUST" 131

4. Is the issue on earth of such a nature that it settles auto-
matically and unequivocally Mephistopheles' wager with the Lord ?

1. Does Faust die a natural death or not? — This question acquires
significance only on the assumption that Faust's life was to be for-
feited whenever he should express a desire for time to stand still.
In the last analysis, it turns therefore on the validity of the second
half of the wager, independently of the first. As it has been shown
that such an interpretation is untenable, we should have to decide
whether, at the time of his death, when Faust speaks the words in
question, he applies them to a moment of either idleness, or Mephisto-
phelian enjoyment, or sterile self-complacency. Not even those,
however, who maintain that Faust loses, set up such a preposterous
claim, and it is clear therefore that Faust's death is not due to the
words he has uttered.

On the contrary, Faust dies a natural death. The point can be
proved not only by lines 11591-92,

Der mir so kraftig widerstand,

Die Zeit wird Herr, der Greis hier liegt im Sand,

but perhaps even more definitely by the earlier references to Faust's
approaching death, on the part of the three comrades of "Sorge"
in lines 11396-97 and of Mephistopheles himself in lines 11 525 if.
and especially 11557-58.

If the scene in question belonged to the world of matter-of-fact
reality we should have to say it is an accident that Faust's natural
death at the age of one hundred years coincides with his utterance
of the fatal words. If we consider, however, the requirements of
dramatic effectiveness and, still more, of an evidently typical or
symbolic treatment, the adopted device appears almost inevitable.
Had Faust's final admission of the possibility of true human happi-
ness been wrung from him at an earlier period of his life, his conflict
with Mephistopheles would have been at an end. The drama, as
the story of this conflict, would have had to end then and there if
the poet expected us to accept his hero's confession as his final view
of life, as "wisdom's last word." On the other hand, the Lord had
given Mephistopheles leave to try his arts of seduction on Faust
to the very end of his life on earth. Had Faust been destined to
lose his struggle the catastrophe might easily have come at any time

531

132 A. R. HOHLFELD

in his career; but as he was to win, i.e., not to lose,1 it had to be
made clear that his resistance to the blandishments of Mephis-
topheles would continue to the end of life, and if this life was to be
in any way symbolic of the general trials and triumphs of "ernes
Menschen hohes Streben" we had to be permitted to witness its
power of resistance even to the limits of extremest old age.

2. Does Faust win or lose his wager with Mephistopheles ? — Gen-
erally speaking, the more recent Faust literature shows a growing
consensus of opinion that Faust wins his wager.2 Cases of arch-
negation, if they still occur, are few and far between. Numerous,
to be sure, is as yet that group — and it includes some important
names — which distinguishes between a verdict according to the
letter (Wortlaut) and one according to the spirit (Sinn), the former
favorable to Mephistopheles, the latter to Faust, but it is clear that
in the last analysis this group is on the side of those declaring in
favor of Faust, for, on both human and poetic grounds, not the
letter, but the spirit is bound to prevail in this conflict.

Critics who are willing to give an unconditional verdict in Faust's
favor base it generally not so much on a correct interpretation of
the wager as on the fact that in the final text, as we now read it,
Faust does not actually address the words in question to the fleeting
moment. He speaks only conditionally, hypothetically (Zum
Augenblicke diirft' ich sagen; 1. 11581). Others lay stress on the
fact that the moment which Faust has in mind is not a situation
that he is then enjoying (except in anticipation) but that he is
thinking of the future when his lofty vision might be realized.
Hence, instead of bidding the passing present to linger (which
clearly is the sense of 1. 1699) he merely feels he might be justified
in doing so sometime in a still distant future.

Evidently Goethe has done well to revise, as it would seem, the
original version of Faust's testamentary speech quite shortly before
his death, prompted by the desire for a more careful elaboration
"der Hauptmotive, die ich, um fertig zu werden, allzu lakonisch

i It must be remembered that Faust does not wager that something will happen,
but that something will never happen.

* The attempt to secure the assistance of a strictly legal interpretation proved a
complete failure. The two learned jurists who in the Goethe- Jahrbuch, 24 (1903), 113-31,
argued the case came to diametrically opposite findings.

532

PACT AND WAGER IN GOETHE'S "FAUST" 133

behandelt hatte" (Tgb., Jan. 24, 1832; Graf, No. 1977). For if
even in the face of this final redaction Goethe's critics have had
such difficulties in deciding the wager, what would they have done
with the earlier version which, instead of the entire sustained and
noble speech of twenty-eight lines (11. 11559-86) as we now read it,
contained only a short passage of largely prosaic lines ?

Dem Graben, der durch Siimpfe schleicht,

Und endlich doch das Meer erreicht,

Gewinn' ich Platz fur viele Millionen,

Da will ich unter ihnen wohnen,

Auf wahrhaft eignem Grund und Boden stehn.

Ich darf zum Augenblicke sagen:

Verweile doch, Du bist so schon!

Es kann die Spur von meinen Erdetagen

Nicht in Aonen untergehn.1

Here it is clear that Faust speaks in the present tense to the
present moment,2 even though here, too, the present is dear to him
not for its own sake, but because it reveals the possibility of a still
better and broader future. And yet, as early as August 3, 1815,
when Sulpiz Boissere"e said to Goethe in regard to the final fate of
Faust, then a matter of considerable debate, "Ich denke mir, der
Teufel behalte Unrecht," Goethe with evident assent replied,
"Faust macht im Anfang dem Teufel eine Bedingung, woraus
Alles folgt."3 This "Bedingung" is evidently not the one in line
1699 (Werd' ich zum Augenblicke sagen ....), for that, taken by
itself, is literally fulfilled according to the text of the older version.
It might explain Faust's losing, but not his winning the wager.
Goethe here refers with satisfactory definiteness to lines 1692-97 as

1 Of. Otto Harnack's edition of Faust in Vol. V of Goethes Werke, ed. Karl Heine-
mann, Lpzg. and Wien, Bibliogr. Institut, n.d., pp. 21, 518, 572. This important change,
strange to say, is mentioned by but few of the commentators, although many of them
refer to the change from "darf" to "durff " in 1. 11581. Prom the variants in the
Weimar edition it is almost impossible to get a clear view of the condition of the MS
at this point.

2 The point is really of some importance; for critics who rest their claim that Faust
wins his wager chiefly on the fact that he speaks only hypothetically and not of the
present lose the entire basis for their contention as soon as the earlier reading is substi-
tuted for the final one. That is, according to their interpretation Goethe had Faust
lose his wager until a few weeks before his death and then suddenly decided to make
him win it — an apparent absurdity.

8 Cf. above, p. 125, footnote 1. It is in this same conversation that Goethe, while
refusing to give information about the end of Faust's career, states: "Aber es istauch
schon fertig, und sehr gut und grandios gerathen, aus der besten Zeit." (Graf, No. 1162.)

533

134 'A. R. HOHLFELD

the basic condition on which the wager between Faust and Mephis-
topheles turns, for on this supposition only does Faust remain
victorious no matter whether we adopt the older and briefer text
or the nobler and more explicit lines of the revised version.

Of course, if even the earlier reading justifies the assumption of
Faust's victory over Mephistopheles, the later one positively clamors
for it. When, in the shadow of death, Faust uses the ominous
phrase that seems to challenge the fleeting moment to delay1 and
speaks of what he then experiences as the enjoyment of the best
and highest which life had to offer him, he' is referring to things
that are as far removed from Mephistopheles' "Staub" or his own
"Faulbett" as they are near the heart of what the Lord laid stress
upon as "Tatigkeit" and "Streben."

Mephistopheles, who clings to inapplicable words and attempts
to prove his claim by them, does no more nor less than what under
similar circumstances a human extortioner would also do. He tries
to make the best of what he instinctively feels to be a bad case
bound to go against him.

The fact that Faust has won the wager over Mephistopheles
(and the latter therefore, as we shall see, has lost his wager with
the Lord) must not be construed to mean that thereby, eo ipso, to
speak in the language of the religious symbolism in which the last
scenes of the drama are conceived, he can claim entrance into heaven
as one of the blessed. Only divine judgment can determine this,
and if — as the advent of the angels proves — it decides in Faust's
favor, despite the heavy guilt that rests on him, it represents a
justice tempered by mercy and love.2

3. Has Faust not lost the wager with Mephistopheles at some earlier
point in the action f — In answer to this question, which has repeatedly

1 1 am not able to discuss here the question what Goethe's reason may have been for
reintroducing in the Death Scene the very phraseology used by Faust in the Pact Scene
(not only in 11. 11581-82, but also in 11. 11593-95). I merely wish to refer to at least
two places where explanations are attempted that are not based on a wrong conception
of the wager: Otto Pniower in the Pantheon edition of Faust, Vol.-II, Berlin, n.d. (1903),
p. xlii and Otto Woerner, Fausts Ende, Freiburg i. Br., 1902, p. 25.

* From this point of view must be interpreted the often quoted letter of Goethe
to K. E. Schubarth of November 3, 1820 (Graf, No. 1219) in which Goethe says:
"Mephistopheles darf seine Wette nur halb gewinnen, und wenn die halbe Schuld auf
Faust ruhen bleibt, so tritt das Begnadigungsrecht des alten Herrn sogleich herein, zum
heitersten Schluss des Ganzen."

534

PACT AND WAGER IN GOETHE'S "FAUST" 135

been raised — and not without justification — it might of course
suffice to point out that Mephistopheles does not think so. But
inasmuch as Mephistopheles, especially in long stretches of the
Second Part, almost completely loses the role of an aggressive
adversary, this fact alone is not sufficiently convincing.

Here, too, everything necessarily depends upon our conception
of the terms of the wager. If the mere desire for the fleeting moment
to linger were to decide the wager against Faust, I think we should
have to admit that he has lost it more than once, unless it be con-
sidered imperative that the very words, "Verweile doch, du bist so
schon!" be spoken. These words, to be sure, Faust does not speak;
but has he not felt them during moments of peaceful contempla-
tion in "Wald und Hohle," in the enjoyment of Gretchen's love, or
in even larger measure during his union with Helen ?

Critics who raise these questions at all, generally answer them
either by denying any wish on the part of Faust to delay the passing
moment,1 or by pointing to the disturbing factor of a guilty con-
science and evil foreboding, or to the unreality of his dream-like
experiences in the sphere of Helen. Simpler and more convincing
is again an explanation that rests upon a proper interpretation of
the wager. For in all such moments of happiness, the Gretchen
episode included^ it can be shown that Faust is far removed from
that sphere of sensual and spiritual degradation which underlies the
terms of his wager with Mephistopheles. Even if he actually had
addressed to the fleeting moment the prayer to delay, Mephistopheles
would have had no better right for claiming to have won the wager
than he has in the end at the hour of Faust's death.

4. Does the issue on earth automatically settle Mephistopheles'
wager with the Lord ?— That Mephistopheles loses his wager with
the Lord is quite generally admitted, even by those who doubt or
deny his failure in his relation with Faust. Goethe himself, from
whom we are unable to quote any absolutely unequivocal statement
in regard to the outcome of the wager between Faust and Mephis-
topheles, expresses himself in this respect in the tersest and most
definite language. Speaking to Eckermann in 1827, he declares,

i Certainly not an easy undertaking in the face of lines like 3191-92; 3217;
6493-94; 9381-82.

535

136 »A. R. HOHLFELD

"dass der Teufel die Wette verliert," and the context makes it per-
fectly clear that the wager to which he has reference is the one in
the Prologue in Heaven.1

Indeed, if it has been made clear (cf . above, p. 130) that the basic
terms of Faust's wager with Mephistopheles are identical with those
underlying Mephistopheles' wager against the Lord, then it needs
no further proof that Faust's winning his wager against Mephis-
topheles necessarily means that Mephistopheles has lost his wager
with the Lord.

The foregoing analysis of the entire problem, in the light of
the different interpretations attempted and objections raised, seems
to me to furnish convincing evidence that, whatever may be our
judgment about the lack of regular symmetry and close-knit unity
in the work as a whole or about undeniable incongruities or disloca-
tions in certain scenes, the central axis, around which the dramatic
action of Goethe's Faust moves, is sound and without flaw.

As Julian Schmidt has once expressed it, the three characteristic
passages which at present carry the central thought of the drama
were still lacking in the original versions of the Urfaust and the
Fragment. They are not the trunk from which all this motley
variety of scenes has sprouted, but rather the support that has
been placed under it afterwards. But I feel inclined to continue:
it is a support carefully planned and strongly put together, quite
capable of holding up the great mass of the luxuriant growth resting
upon it, even though here and there single unruly shoots may be
trailing to the ground or threatening to fly off with the breeze — not to
the disadvantage of the living beauty of the whole, even though to
the annoyance of some of the sternest among the high priests of
unruffled regularity and order.

A. R. HOHLFELD
UNIVERSITY OP WISCONSIN

i Of. Graf. No. 1481.

536

THE CAVE SCENE IN DIE FAMILIE SCHROFFENSTEIN

At the beginning of the famous cave scene of Die Familie Schrof-
fenstein (Act V, scene 1) stands a stage-direction which runs in part
as follows: " (Agnes mit einem Hute, in zwei Kleidern. Das Uber-
kleid ist vorn mit Schleifen zugebunden.)"

This is somewhat unusual, as it gives the impression that Agnes
must have changed her usual mode of dressing to be ready for
extraordinary events soon to be enacted in the cave. Certainly
Kleist felt, when he wrote the direction, that the actress needed
special instructions in costuming for the part.

Scholars have accepted this stage-direction at par without much
question. Even Meyer-Benfey, who analyzes the play with his
usual detail and pedantic fulness, seems not to suspect anything
unusual here. But a comparison of the direction with the text of
the scene will show that it does not accord with Kleist's original
conception, that it is an afterthought, a questionable attempt to
make the play acceptable to the theater-going public.

Dressing "in zwei Kleidern" is not motivated in any way in the
play. An attempt at motivation would be an intolerable absurdity.
Putting on a double suit in the safety of her castle at Warwand, in
order to run into danger in the mountain-cave and exchange the
outer one for Ottokar's mantle, in an effort to deceive two murderers
from Rossitz, Rupert, and Santing, merely to save her life, would be
the acme of absurdity.

Plainly Agnes suspects no danger until she has come to the cave
and Barnabe has confided to her the accidental meeting with Rupert
and Santing (Act IV, scene 4) and her indiscretion in mentioning
her errand to Agnes and the tryst in the mountains, for she expresses
the vain wish :

Hattest du mir friiher das gesagt! Ich fuhle
Mich sehr beangstigt, mochte lieber, dass
Ich nicht gefolgt dir ware.

Just as plainly, Ottokar is coming to save Agnes' life from his
father's hands, but he has no plan formed, no conception of an

5371 137 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, February, 1921

138 JOHW WILLIAM SCROLL

exchange of clothing as the means of rescue. This must appear
from the following circumstances. He has just learned of Sylvester's
innocence, has sent Barnabe to bring Agnes to the mountain-cave,
that he may announce his discovery. Before going himself he
confides the news to his mother, Eustache, who, misjudging Rupert's
mood, reveals to the latter not only the innocence of Sylvester but
also the love of Ottokar and Agnes and their habitual trysting in
the mountains (Act IV, scene 1). This leads at once to Ottokar 's
imprisonment, so that Rupert may seek out Agnes unhindered.
By the connivance of the turnkey, Eustache gains admission to the
prison, confesses to Ottokar her great indiscretion and Rupert's mur-
derous plan:

Und jetzt erschlagt er seine Tochter [Act IV, scene 5].
Also:

.... Wenn sie in dem Gebirge jetzt,
1st sie verloren, er und Santing sucht sie.

These two bits of information from the mother, coupled with his
own knowledge of Agnes' presence in the mountains, condition his
whole behavior. He is already considerably delayed by his imprison-
ment, but he knows the directest path to the cave, and may yet
arrive in time. He makes in perfect safety the rather remarkable
leap of fifty feet (cf. Wallenstein's safe fall in Regensburg) from a
rather remarkably unguarded window, succeeds in evading his father
and Santing, and arrives at nightfall.

The time guarantees deep darkness at a little distance within
from the mouth of the cave, and everything is in keeping. Barnabe
has to look "scharf hin auf den Weg" and "es wird sehr finster
schon im Tal"; she sees "aus alien Hausern schon Lichter schim-
mern" and "da regt sich etwas Dunkles doch im Nebel," and she
can barely distinguish human shapes at a little distance, but not
whether they are one or two. In such a scene there is no need for
double costumes to avoid nudity.

When the lovers meet, Ottokar impulsively reveals his fear for
Agnes' safety by his joy in finding her still alive. From Agnes he
now learns what he had not known before his arrival, namely, that
Rupert and Santing are not blindly seeking her in the mountains,
but have a clue in the movements of Barnabe ("Wir mussen ihnen

538

THE CAVE SCENE IN "DiE FAMILIE SCHROFFENSTEIN" 139

auf die Fahrte gehen," Act IV, scene 4). This revelation makes a
plan of rescue imperative, and imposes haste. But little time is
left. The exchange of clothing occurs to Ottokar now for the first
time as promising a disguise under which Agnes may escape to
Warwand in safety, one which he himself can easily doff in the
presence of Rupert, if necessary, or in which he may fall unrecog-
nized, if only Agnes is saved.

How does Kleist, how does Ottokar conceive this change of
clothing ?

Plainly as something unmaidenly, something that Agnes in her
modesty would refuse as readily and positively as Kathchen von
Heilbronn refuses to bare her feet and ankles in the presence of
Gottschalk when she wishes to cross the river with the "Futteral"
(Kathchen, Act IV, scene 1). Agnes' fear of the murderers and
her modesty must both be overcome. Ottokar accomplishes both
by laying before her his discovery of Peter's death by drowning,
Sylvester's consequent innocence, and the hopes for their union to
be grounded on these facts.

.... Lasst uns

Die schone Stunde innig fassen. Moge

Die Trauer schwatzen und die Langeweile,

Das Gliick ist stumm. Wir machen diese Nacht

Zu einem Fest der Liebe, willst du ?

He promises reconciliation of the fathers, public betrothal, and then :
Mit diesem Kuss verlob' ich mich dir.

And now he announces the plan of rescue:

Noch eins. Wir werden hier die Kleider wechseln,
In einer Viertelstunde fiihrst du Agnes
In Mdnnerkleidern heim.

This passage must be forced from its natural meaning, if it is
applied to a simple exchange of Agnes' "tlberkleid" and "Hut" for
Ottokar's "Mantel" and "Helm." But that the exchange is some-
thing more complete is shown by the careful removal of Barnabe to
the cave's mouth, as well as by Ottokar's succeeding efforts to take
Agnes' heart and imagination by storm with the words:

Du wirst mein Weib, mein Weib! Weisst du derm auch,
Wie gross das Mass von Gliick ?
539

140 JOHN WILLIAM SCROLL

and the less delicate hint:

0 du Gliickliche! Der Tag,

Die Nacht vielmehr ist nicht mehr fern. Es kommt, du weisst,
Den Liebenden das Licht nur in der Nacht, —
Errotest du ?

Agnes' embarrassed question :

So wenig schtitzt das Dunkel ?
and Ottokar's reply:

Nur vor dem Auge, Torin, doch ich seh'

Mit meiner Wange, dass du gluhst,

confirm the impression of deep darkness.

Then follows the description of the wedding-day, the departure
of the guests, the retirement of the wedded lovers, all accompanied
by appropriate action. Agnes' love is enkindled, her imagination
filled, so that she yields passively to what follows, scarcely realizing
it, save as a thing permissible to wedded lovers.

Dann ktihner wird die Liebe,
Und weil du mein bist — bist du denn nicht mein ? —
So nehm' ich dir den Hut vom Haupte (er tut es), store
Der Locken steife Ordnung (er tut es), driicke kiihn
Das Tuch hinweg (er tut es), du lispelst leis', o losche
Das Licht! und plotzlich, tief verhullend, webt
Die Nacht den Schleier um die heilige Liebe,
Wie jetzt.

At this stage Agnes' imagination identifies the dark cave with
the bridal chamber after the candle has been extinguished to spare
the bride's modesty. She has already had removed her hat and the
kerchief that hid her neck and bosom (cf. Graf Wetter 's "Tuch"
which he gives to Kathchen to cover her exposed bosom, and the
"Halstuch" which Freiberg threatens to take from Kunigunde to
reveal her deformity, Kdthchen, Act II, scene 6), and now, while
passion floods like a bank-full stream in spring

.... schnell

Lose ich die Schleife, schnell noch eine (er tut es), streife dann
Die fremde Hiille leicht dir ab (er tut es).

Again it is forcing the natural meaning to make "fremde Hulle"
mean a mere outer garment. That which does not belong to the
body, is not a part of the body, is " fremd." We have here a contrast

540

THE CAVE SCENE IN "DiE FAMILIE SCHROFFENSTEIN" 141

between the natural body and the body's foreign covering, and the
language can only imply a complete removal of Agnes' clothing.

This is confirmed by her behavior. As she feels her garments
removed, she exclaims: "O Ottokar, was machst du?" and in her
tense emotion falls upon his neck to hide her confusion, and he
answers:

.... Bin Gehilfe der Natur
Stett' ich sie wieder her,

words which are absolutely devoid of sense, if Agnes is not absolutely
nude. How could he, as a servant of nature, restore nature, by
removing an "tlberkleid" only, and leaving her completely dressed ?
It does not help at all that the author inserts here another stage-
direction: "(An dem tlberkleide beschaftigt)." It only makes the
following passage stand out more sharply in contrast, when Ottokar
justifies his act by the question:

.... Denn wozu noch

Das Unergriindliche geheimnisvoll

Verschleiern ? Alles Schone, liebe Agnes,

Braucht keinen anderen Schleier als den eignen,

Denn der ist freilich selbst die Schonheit.

A moment of anxiety interrupts them here, for Rupert and
Santing are approaching the cave's mouth and have probably caught
sight of Barnabe, the lovers' sentinel. Haste is needed. Ottokar
returns to Agnes and says:

.... dufrierst,
Nimm diesen Mantel um (er hdngt ihr seinen Mantel urn).

Again this implies her nudity, and shows what sort of re-dressing
is undertaken. It is not a formal and complete donning of Ottokar 's
suit, for he has not undressed. She has but a man's mantle folded
close about her. As she sits thus before him, Ottokar exclaims:

Wer wiirde glauben, dass der grobe Mantel

So zartes deckte, als ein Mddchenleib ?

Driick' ich dir noch den Helm auf deine Locken,

Mach' ich auch Weiber mir zu Nebenbuhlern.

The contrast here of "der grobe Mantel" and "ein zartes Mad-
chenleib" is in keeping with our interpretation and offers nothing in
support of the stage-direction.

541

142 JOHN WILLIAM SCHOLL

At this point a stage-direction tells us: "(Ottokar wirft schnell
Agnes' Oberkleid iiber, und setzt ihren Hut auf)." Inasmuch as he
has only removed his mantle and helmet, this is intelligible and suffi-
cient. Now that the disguise is accomplished, Ottokar ventures
to inform Agnes that his father is coming, and that no one will
harm her, if she will only go boldly out of the cave "ohne ein Wort zu
reden .... in deiner Mannertracht."

It only remains to examine the closing scenes, to determine
whether any other passage confirms or contradicts the assumption
that Agnes leaves the cave nude, except for Ottokar's " Mantel"
and " Helm."

We see later simply that the disguise is complete enough to fulfil
its purpose. Agnes is permitted to pass by Santing and Rupert,
because they believe her Ottokar, and when she returns to the cave,
and Sylvester appears with torches, it deceives even her father, and
she falls a victim to his mistaken revenge.

Still later, when blind Sylvius discovers the error by the sense of
touch, the language is so general that it is not pertinent, and even
the words of the grief-stricken parents of the dead lovers give no
further support to either view.

Internal evidence proves that the original conception of Kleist
was, that Agnes had all her clothing removed and escaped with
Ottokar's mantle and helmet only. The insertion of the stage-
directions was an afterthought, an effort to make the scene theater-
fahig. Perhaps it was not alone the grotesque madness of Johann,
and the impossible absurdity of the little finger of Peter's corpse
being identified by the mother after it had been cooked for Barnabe's
witches'-broth, that provoked the laughter of Kleist's friends in
Switzerland when he read them these closing scenes. They may
have been startled at the naivete" of a dramatist who demanded of
his star actress a complete disrobing on the stage, even in theatrical
darkness. For the Kleist who delighted in the " Schrecken in Bade "
and evidently lingered with delight over the physical perfections of
Kathchen, especially in the grotto scene, nothing could be more
natural. If we add that he was at the height of his Rousseauistic
cult at the time of his first Paris visit and his subsequent Swiss
sojourn, the argument seems complete.

542

THE CAVE SCENE IN "DiE FAMILIE SCHROFFENSTEIN " 143

The result of the whole study would indicate further, that the
cave scene may have been conceived first as a separate poem, a
companion to the "Schrecken im Bade," and only later made the
starting-point for the creation of a five-act drama. This backward
development of the dramatic movement may readily account for
the triviality and inconsequence of some elements of the exposition
which have been stumbling-blocks to the careful reader. The action
did not grow out of given materials by logical necessity, but it was
pieced together to lead up to a scene already composed, which, how-
ever, still retained certain inextinguishable elements of its original
conception that were discordant with the later dramatic inventions.

JOHN WILLIAM SCROLL
UNIVERSITY OP MICHIGAN

543

FRIEDRICH LIENHARDS LITERATURBETRACHTUNG1

Unser Gegenstand Friedrich Lienhards Literaturbetrachtung
schliesst eine griindliche Behandlung des Dichters Friedrich Lienhard
aus, obwohl sie notig ware, denn von dem echtdeutschen Dichter
aus dem Elsass ist hierzulande so gut wie nichts bekannt, und nicht
einmal unter den Lehrern des Deutschen, die ihn aber ebenso kennen
und bekannt machen sollten, wie es die Lehrer und Freunde des
Franzosischen mit Rene* Bazin tun. Und wie Bazins Roman aus
dem Elsass Les Oberle uberall in den Vereinigten Staaten gelesen
und gepriesen wird, so sollte auch Lienhards Roman aus der Revolu-
tionszeit im Elsass Oberlin gelesen und gewiirdigt werden. Es heisst
im Vorwort zur 15. Auflage dieses Romans: "Der Verfasser ist
Elsasser; da sein Geburtstag vor 1870 fallt, ist er sogar 'geborener
Franzose/ obschon unsere unterelsassische Ecke, die ehemalige
Grafschaft Hanau-Lichtenberg von franzosischer Zivilisation nur
wenig Verwandlungen erfahren hat. Demnach kennt er Land und
Leute aus eigener Anschauung und Blutsverwandtschaft. Er will
gegen keine der beiden Nationen unbillig sein und keine Kon-
fession verletzen. Seine Welt- und Kunstanschauung jedoc'h wur-
zelt im deutschen Geistes- und Gemutsleben."

Lienhard wurde 1865 in Rothbach im Unterelsass als Sohn eines
Dorfschulmeisters geboren und studierte von 1884 an in Strassburg
und Berlin; er brach aber sein Studium nach sieben Semestern ab,
weil es ihn zum Schriftsteller drangte. Seine Universitatsstudien
beendete er nicht, aber die neue Berliner revolutionare Literatur
der 1880er Jahre befriedigte ihn auf die Dauer auch nicht. In
einen burgerlichen Beruf fand er sich nicht, so entwickelte er sich
frei zu seinem eigentlichen Beruf in der deutschen Literatur. Er
war einige Jahre Hauslehrer, ging auf Reisen, war kurze Zeit in
Berlin Zeitiuigsschreiber und ging wieder in die weite Welt, u.a.
nach der Schweiz, Italien, Spanien, Skandinavien und Schottland.
1903 brach er mit der Tagesschriftstellerei. Seitdem ist er nicht

1 Dieser Aufsatz gibt im wesentlichen den Vortrag wieder, wie er am 29. Dezember
1916 vor der Modern Language Association ol America in Princeton University gehalten
wurde.
545] 145 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, February, 1921

146 » F. SCHOENEMANN

mehr der Journalist Fritz Lienhard, wie er sich zuerst nannte,
sondern Friedrich Lienhard, der freie Kritiker und freischaffende
Dichter.

Als ein Dorfler ist er in die deutsche Literatur gekommen, und
ein weltferner Dorfler ist er bis heute geblieben. Wie er in dem
Gedicht auf Burns sagt:

Ich bin ja auch

Wie du zu Haus in Flur und Strauch.

Ich will in Not und Sonnenschein

Wie du ein Kind und Bauer sein!

1895, als ein Dreissigjahriger, beginnt Friedrich Lienhard sein
eigentliches Dichtertum: es erscheinen seine Lieder eines Elsdssers.
Sie zeigen, warum es ihu in Berlin nicht lange gelitten hat. Politische
Grtinde sind es naturlich nicht, denn er achtjte, ja liebta das Preus-
sentum mit seiner Lebensordnung, seiner Gewissenhaftigkeit, seiner
Zuverlassigkeit, mit seiaem Sinn fur Geschichte, und verehrte auch
im Bunde mit andern deutschen Geistern den Preussen Friedrich
den Grossen. Der Dorfler vom Unterelsass hasste die Grossstadt
Berlin. Kennzeichnend heisst ems seiner Gedichte Nie wie die
Grossstadt! Er fiihlte sich als Elsasser. In einer Kriegsschrift
vom Jahre 1914, betitelt: Das deutsche Elsass, schreibt er: "Wir
[d.i. Elsasser] haben alle, neben der ruhigen Gastfreundschaft
unseres schonen Landes, einen Wanderdrang und eine kriegerische
Ader in unserm Wesen." Das zeigt sich hier wie in verschiedenen
spateren Werken als eine deutsch gefarbte Aufnahmefahigkeit fur
alles Fremde, in Liedern und Biichern der Wanderlust und in der
Vorliebe fur das Heroische in der Kunst.

Ein Jahr nach den Liedern eines Ekdssers erscheinen die still-
schonenWasgaufahrten, ein Wander- und Weltanschauungsbuch,in dem
auch zu der Zeit Stellung genommen wird. 1897 folgte ein elsas-
sisches Drama: Gottfried von Strassburg, 1898 eine Legende in drei
Aufztigen von Odilia, der Schutzheiligen vom Elsass, mit dem liebe-
vollen Wunsch im Schlusswort :

Ein Sonntag komme, dem kein Sonntag gleich,

All meinem Elsass, meinem Konigreich!

Doch wie gern und wie schon unser Dichter auch sang und sagte
von seinem Elsass, schliesslich konnte ihm ein Elsasser Poeten-

546

FRIEDRICH LIENHARDS LITERATURBETRACHTUNG

147

winkel nicht geniigen. Das hat er in seinem Gedicht Abschied vom
Elsass sehr tief ausgedriickt. Urn 1900 bahnt er sich einen Weg
wieder nach Deutschland, nach dem Deutschland seiner Ideale.
Er fand auf diesem seinem Wege Hindernisse, die er wegraumen
musste. Daher sehen wir ihn als Kritiker, der nunmehr zu gewissen
Zeiterscheinungen in der Literatur seine bestimmte Stellung nimmt.
Von jetzt an bleibt er sich seiner selbst als Dichterpersonlichkeit
bewusst.

Seit 1900 haben wir zunachst eine Reihe kulturkritischer und
asthetischer Schriften und sodann eine Anzahl wenn vielleicht nicht
immer grosser, so doch hochst bedeutsamer Zeugnisse seines kiinst-
lerischen Konnens.

Seine Kritik — von eigentiimlich aufbauender Art — ist enthalten
in Werken wie Neue Ideale, einer Sammlung von Aufsatzen, zuerst
1901 gedruckt, und Die Wege nach Weimar (1905-8). Eins seiner
schonsten Biicher, das Thuringer Tagebuch, mit sehr schonem Buch-
schmuck von Ernst Liebermann und viel reicherem Inhalt als der
Titel ahnen lasst, sei nur eben erwahnt. Jene Kritik gelangt zu
zwei hauptsachlichen Ergebnissen: zum Begriff der Heimatkunst
und zur Auffassung von " Weimar" als Geistesstimmung oder
Gemiitszustand.

In den Neuen Idealen steht der bekannte grosse Aufsatz vom
Jahre 1900: Die Vorherrschaft Berlins, worin Lienhard nicht eigent-
lich Los von Berlin! predigt und gegen Berlin als " naturalistischen
und skeptischen Kunst- und Lebensbegriff " ankampft, sondern viel-
mehr fur eine Erganzung Berlins eintritt, und zwar eine Erganzung
durch den Reichtum deutscher Landschaft. In diesem Aufsatz
findet sich allerlei, was heute nicht mehr zutrifft, wertvoll ist aber
heute noch Lienhards Eintreten fur eine reife Heimatliebe in
Leben und Literatur. Er meint damit ausdrucklich "das Stammes-
bewusstsein eines ins grosse Reich bewusst eingegliederten Reichs-
biirgers." Wenn er von dem "naiven Natursohn" redet, der in
die Welt zieht und dann zuruckkehrt "als der alte und doch ein
anderer," so spricht er aus eigenster Erfahrung: wie der Deutsch-
elsasser zum Reichsdeutschen geworden ist. Mit Lienhards Worten :
"Er hat sein Fleckchen eingliedern gelernt ins grosse Reichsganze;
er hat auch seine kleine Pflicht eingegliedert ins Weltganze."

547

148 $. SCHOENEMANN

Lienhard sucht nun das Geheimnis echter Poesie. Die Form,
also Kunst im engeren Sinn, ist ihm nicht die Hauptsache. Die
religios-philosophische Grundstimmung der Seele und die Freiheit
des Weltblicks machen den Kiinstler aus. " Erst aus grosser Weltan-
schauung fliesst grosse Kunstanschauung." Oder: " Menschentum
gilt zuerst, dann erst die Kunst und die Form." Deshalb richtet er
seine Zornesrufe gegen die "Literaturjunglinge mit der fein zise-
lierenden Hand, den schlechten Nerven und unfrischen Herzen."
Der " revolutionaren skeptischen Dichtung" gegeniiber erklart er
sich fur die "grosse Dichtung," die ihm Freudigkeit und Ruhe
bedeutet. Als Heilmittel fur die "Nervositat und dabei doch Inhalt-
losigkeit des Tagesliteratentums" empfiehlt er eine literarische Kunst,
die auf festerem Boden, auf festerer Weltanschauung als die soge-
nannte Moderne steht: die Heimatkunst.

Das Wort Heimatkunst stammt wohl von Adolf Bartels dem
Literaturgeschichtsschreiber, aber was es bezeichnet, das ist im
Grunde langst dagewesen. Wie das etwa Carl Weitbrecht in seiner
Deutschen Literaturgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts1 darlegt. Lien-
hard u.a. hat es nur bewusst erkannt und ausgesprochen, wobei er
dem Wort Heimat noch eine eigene Vertiefung gegeben hat. " Heimat
— so schreibt er — ist schon der geistige und lebendige Umkreis, in
dem sich eine Personlichkeit eingebaut und abgezirkelt hat von der
weiteren Umwelt; Heimat ist auch meine Gedankenwelt und die

Welt meiner Krafte, die ich mir erkampft habe Und fur

diese innere Heimat ist die sinnlich sichtbare Heimat mit ihren
goldenen Ackern und Abendhimmeln, mit Mundarten und Trachten,
mit gemeinsamen Sorgen und Freuden der Betatigungs- und der
Nahrungsboden. Jene Innenwelt ohne fortwahrende Bertihrung
und Auffrischung durch diese farbige Aussenwelt wird abstrakt, diirr
und blass; diese blosse Aussenwelt ohne Verinnerlichung ist niederer
Kulturzustand, wenn ich auch noch so sehr .... an meiner
Heimat hange." Diese Auffassung von Heimat hat er auch poetisch
bekannt, z.B. in dem Gedicht Letzte Fahrt:

Nicht Garizim, Burg Zion nicht,

Nicht Elsass noch der Nordsee Strand:

Mein unerforschlich Vaterland

Weiss ich in Gottes grossem Licht.

iSammlung G6schen (Leipzig, 1908), Vierter Abschnitt: Der poetische Realismus
und am Schluss des 2. Teils.

548

FRIEDRICH LIENHARDS LITERATURBETRACHTUNG 149

Heimatkunst soil keine "Stubenprobleme," nicht mehr blosse
Technik und Symbolistik haben: "nicht Flucht aus dem Modernen,
sondern .... eine Erganzung, eine Erweiterung und Vertiefung
nach der menschlichen Seite bin .... wir wiinschen ganze
Menschen mit einer ganzen und weiten Gedanken-, Gemiits- und
Charakterwelt, mit modernster und doch volkstiimlichster Bildung,
mit national- und doch welthistorischem Sinn." Oder anders:
"Heimatkunst ist eine Selbstbesinnung auf heimatliche Stoffe; in
erster Linie aber ist sie Wesenserneuerung, ist sie Auffrischung

durch Landluft Mit dieser Geistesauffrischung wird freilich

auch eine andere Stoffwahl, eine andere Sprache und Technik Hand
in Hand gehen."

Lienhards hauptsachliche poetische Beitrage zur Heimatkunst
sind: eine Komodie in drei Akten Munchhausen (1900 zuerst aufge-
fiihrt), die Trilogie Till Eulenspiegel, die 1896 begonnen und 1900
beendet wurde, und die dramatische Dichtung in sieben Szenen
Wieland der Schmied (1905).

Munchhausen ist Lienhards phantasievollstes Stiick, ein Lebens-
bild des klassischen Aufschneiders, dessen historisches Vorbild von
1720 bis 1791 gelebt hat. Lienhards Munchhausen ist aber nicht
"eine spazierende Luge oder eine bezopfte Illusion," sondern ein
Mann von Phantasie, eine kunstlerische Natur. Wie er selbst sagt :
"Zu wenig Phantasie! Das ist ein Gebrechen .... der ganzen
zivilisierten Welt." Oder in anderem Zusammenhang: "Ein Esel
erlebt nur von aussen her ein Schock Tragodien oder Komodien und
bleibt ein Esel. Ein Genie aber hort von einem entfernten Gescheh-
nis — und erlebt es sofort mit, bis in Herz und Nieren hinein." Dieser
Munchhausen ist mehr als "ein armer alter invalider Schlossherr
und Edelmann," er wird als solchein Genie geradezu " Reprasentant
der deutschen Bildung," d.h. vom Dichter in die vorklassische Zeit
gertickt.

Menschlich und auch reinkunstlerisch und technischdramatisch
noch bedeutender ist Lienhards Till Eulenspiegel Der Schwank-
held der deutschen Prosaliteratur des 16. Jahrhunderts, der vaga-
bundierende Spassmacher, stellt eine Art Standeskampf dar. Als
Bauer kampft er mit all seinem Mutterwitz gegen das aufsteigende
Burgertum seiner Tage. Aus dem, wenn man will, geschichtlichen
und aus dem sagenhaften Till, der einfaltige Bauernschlaujieit mit

549

150 I*- SCHOENEMANN

der Lebens- und Menschenkenntnis eines echten Humoristen ver-
bindet, macht Lienhard einen Charakter im modernen Sinn, einen
vollen lebendigen Menschen mit einem rechten Menschenschicksal.
Die drei Teile der dramatischen Dichtung heissen Eulenspiegels
Ausfahrt, Schelmenspiel in drei Aufziigen, Der Fremde, Schelmenspiel
in einem Aufzug, und Eulenspiegels Heimkehr, ein Schauspiel in drei
Akten. Die Ausfahrt oder Wandemng in die Welt erklart, warum
Till in die Welt muss. Seine Familie weiss nichts mit ihm anzu-
fangen. Der beratende Familientag der samtlichen Eulenspiegel ist
unwiderstehlich komisch. Till ist eben der Kuckuck unter den
Spatzen, ein Idealist im Keime, der nicht in dieser Welt und einem
weltlichen Beruf aufgehen, sondern frei sein will wie — sein Dichter.
Als Idealist der alten Schule ist er Illusionist. So macht er sich
selber etwas vor, wenn er aus Liebe zur Jugendgespielin "ganz
gewiss ein braver Mensch werden" will. Auch sein guter Vorsatz
wird ein Pflasterstein zum Weg in die Holle, der er sich zuletzt nur
noch eben durch Flucht entzieht. Der folgende Einakter Der
Fremde ist ein kleines feines meisterliches Werk, das kraftvollste
Drama Lienhards. Till erscheint in einem Dorfwirtshaus als
Stotterer und narrt Wirt und Gaste, die sich als "Kluge" aufspielen.
Das Schelmenspiel hat jedoch einen tragischen Untergrund: dieser
Till hat bereits schwere Lebenserfahrungen hinter sich und er ist
Hofnarr geworden. Er spielt mit Leben und Liebe. "Wer ich
bin? Ein Bettler, ein Konig — frei hinfahrend wie der Wind auf
der Heide!" Damit fuhrt er uns zu einer Antwort auf die letzte
Frage nach seinem Wesen. Er ist ruhelos wie das ganze spatere
Mittelalter in Deutschland, als die sittliche Idee der Freiheit in der
deutschen Seele wiedergeboren wurde. Er ist ein ewig Suchender
wie Faust. Der dritte Teil der Trilogie bringt die tiefste tragische
Ausdeutung des ganzen Charakters. Hier versetzt der Dichter
ihn in eine spatere Zeit, den Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts, die
beginnende Reformation, die Zeit der Bauernkriege und der allge-
meinen sozialen Revolution Deutschlands. "Gegen die Zwingherren
in Welt und Kirche" will der herrische Hofnarr kampfen; er
wird im Streit verwundet. Hans Sachs, der wandernde Niirnberger
Schuster- und Dichtergeselle, rettet ihn vom Tode, vom leiblichen
Tode wenigstens und vorlaufig; denn geistig bricht er zusammen.

550

FRIEDRICH LIENHARDS LITERATURBETRACHTUNG 151

"Niedertracht dort und hier, Niedertracht uberall Bin

weder Fiirst noch Bauer — verrottet beide! .... Nenne mir eine
Menschengattung, die ich lieben konnte! Pack alle!" Das verzeichnet
das Ergebnis seines Wanderns. Hans Sachs, den ihm das Schicksal
zum Weggenossen und Freund gegeben hat, will ihn trosten: "Lieber
Wegwart, es ist eine schandbar wuste Zeit, da hast du recht. Aber
die Sonne wird wieder scheinen ! Und bis dahin bleibt uns ein lieblich
Amt: namlich selber Sonne zu sein und Freude zu verbreiten,
so weit unser Bezirk reicht!" Es ist letzten Endes Lienhards
Mahnung: Heimatkultur — Heimatkunst. Fur Till Eulenspiegel
ist es zu spat. Wohl kehrt er in sein Dorf zuriick. Sein letzter

Wunsch ist: " Still will ich nun sein und arbeiten Fein

stille " Und Hans Sachs ruft voller Freude: "Den abson-

derlichsten Sonderling Deutschlands hab ich wohlbehalten ans Ziel
gebracht!" Till ist heimgekehrt, aber nur um zu sterben.1

Dass Lienhard den Begriff Heimatkunst weit fasste, geht auch
aus seiner Wieland-Dichtung hervor. Hatte er in den Neuen
Idealen erklart: "Nicht an die 'moderne Gegenwart' ist also die
Poesie, sei sie 'neu' oder 'alt/ gebunden; dieses Reich der Schonheit
ist uberall und immer, wo der Dichter seine Magie iibt. Grenzenlos
ist sein Reich." So fand er in der Wieland- oder besser der Woland-
sage "wuchtige Trammer einer Erzahlung: wie sich Schmied
Wolund fiir grausame Misshandlung (ihm werden die Sehnen seiner
Fiisse durchschnitten) grausam geracht hat. Betrachtet man sie
niichtern und sachlich, so fordert sie nicht zu symbolischer Auffas-
sung heraus. Und dennoch ist uns Modernen Wielands Hohenflug
aus den Tiefen des Schmerzes ein bedeutsamer My thus." Wieland
schmiedet sich Fittige — ein Federgewand "von seiner Not ge-
trieben" — und fliegt seinem Qualer fort .... der Sonne zu . . . .
oder "in ein sonniges Land, wo seine Kunst unbefangene Menschen
findet." In Lienhards Dichtung ist dargestellt, wie Wieland durch
seine Liebe zur Walkiire Allwiss emporgehoben wird aus seinem
Halbmenschentum. Um so schlimmer ist dann natiirlich sein
Sturz und um so grosser sein letzter Aufstieg. "Dieser Wieland hat
innere Macht" sagt Bodwild, die andere Frau, die ihn liebt: "0—

i Lienhards Gedicht Eulenspiegel auf der Winterheide hilft den Charakter seines
Eulenspiegels erklaren; Till seufzt da: " Narr darf ich nur, nicht Sanger sein!"

551

152 F • SCHOENEMANN

und nun ein Kriippel! Dieser Menschheit, die keine Manner mehr
hat, 1st ein Held genommen!" Wieland, der "Mann der Schmer-
zen," muss sich selbst (iberwinden, sein "Herz heilen." Alrune, die
Waldfrau, rat ihm, beschwort ihn: "Schmiede den Schmerz!"
Und er schmiedet sich frei.

Wieland der Schmied hatte eine grosse Wirkung im Harzer
Bergtheater, d.i. auf der Naturbiihne, die 1903 von Ernst Wachler
gegriindet worden ist, und dort ist es jahrelang das am meisten
gespielte Stuck geblieben. Auf der geschlossenen Btihne hat es
nicht die gleiche Wirkung erzielt; und wenn es nicht ein grosses
Drama ist, bedeutet es jedenfalls eine gute Dichtung, die ebenso wie
Lienhards langere Einleitung dazu hochst lesenswert ist.

Das geniige fur Lienhards Heimatkunst in Lehre und Vorbild, im
engeren oder mehr landschaftlichen und im weiteren geistigeren
Sinn. Zu Lienhards Begriff von "Weimar" mussen wir vor allem
seine Wege nach Weimar heranziehen, seinen bis jetzt bedeutendsten
Beitrag zur Literaturbetrachtung. Die sechs Bande dieser Wege nach
Weimar erschienen zunachst in Monatsheften von 1905 bis 1908.
In der 2. Auflage 1910-11 ist die voile Buchform hergestellt, indem
die zusammengehorigen Auf sat ze in Gruppen vereinigt wurden.
Man hat es aber nicht mit einer Zeitschrift, sondern mit einem
selbstandigen Werk des Verfassers zu tun, der "eine hohere Geistes-
stimmung herauszuarbeiten bemiiht" war: das was er " Weimar "
nennt. Er betrachtet Weimar nicht nur "nach der raumlichen
Vorstellung" etwa als anmutiges Residenzstadtchen im Ilmtal und
ebensowenig nur "nach seiner historischen Idee," d.h. als gemein-
schaftliche Heimat von Goethe, Schiller und Herder. Es ist ihm
nicht um den Ort und das Wort zu tun. Das eigentlich Wertvolle
und Lebendige ist ihm Weimars Wirkung. Er schreibt :

Das Wort "Weimar" erhalt erst wie die Worte " Wartburg," "Sanssouci,"
"Hellas" — Leben und Sinn, wenn es in jedem von uns ahnliche Krafte
erzeugt, wie sie dortlebendig gewesen. Und so bedeutet uns denndas magische
Wort nur das Verstandigungszeichen fur einen f einer menschlichen Zustand:
und zu diesem den Aufweg zu versuchen, ist der wahre Weg nach Weimar.

Es ist der Weg in die schopferische Stille, zur asthetischen Kultur.
Und er sagt erlauternd: "In herzlicher Anteilnahme von den Dingen

552

FRIEDRICH LIENHABDS LITERATURBETRACHTUNG 153

der Erde frei sein und sie mit kiinstlerisch verfeinertem und sittlich
gelautertem Geist beherrschen, d.i. das Ziel der asthetischen Kultur."

Es geht "eine historische Grundlinie" durch alle diese Unter-
haltungen, Studien und Betrachtungen. Heinrich von Stein und
Emerson (Band I) geben die allgemein-geistige, Shakespeare und
Homer (II) die allgemein-asthetische Grundlage. In Friedrich
dem Grossen und Kant (III) erscheint die heroische Linie, daran fugt
sich (in Band IV) die weichere Welt eines Herder und Jean Paul; die
Heine schliesst mit Schiller (V) und Goethe (VI). Mit diesen
Namen ist immer nur dietJberschriftdes betreffenden Bandes gegeben.
In den Banden befinden sich noch zahlreiche Aufsatze iiber Dichter
wie Holderlin, Scheffel, Raabe oder Byron, Thoreau und Whitman,
iiber Denker wie Rousseau, Nietzsche und Gobineau oder ganze
Literaturgebiete, z.B. liber das Marchen oder altenglische Balladen.1
Wie Lienhard im letzten Band gesteht: "Es steckt Fiille von Arbeit
und Nachdenken, das darf man wohl ruhig aussprechen, in diesen
Heften, die durchweg auf die Quellen zurtickgehen, aber alles Gelehrte
zu vermeiden suchen." Es ist Wissenschaft in " erlebniswarme
Weisheit" verwandelt. In einem wertvollen Vortrag iiber Parsi-
fal und Zarathustra, der 1914 erschien, rechnet sich der Verfasser
"nicht zu den Gralforschern, sondern zu den Gralsuchern," so kann
man ihn nach seinen Wegen nach Weimar einen Literatursucher
nennen. Er ist kein akademischer Forscher, auf das Erleben kommt
ihm alles an. Als selbtschaffender Ktinstler ist er "Phantasie- und
Seelenmensch/' d.h. ein Mensch des Erlebnisses, der die Kunst
"hat," in sich tragt, und deshalb ein sicherer Ftihrer zur echten
Literatur.

Lienhards Wege nach Weimar sind ein " Werk der Stille." Diese
stillen, starken Gedanken eines freien Literaturbetrachters haben
sich auch in anderer Form vor die Offentlichkeit gewagt. So haben
wir ein entziickendes Biichelchen Das klassische Weimar (1909), das
aus Vorlesungen in Jenaer Ferienkursen hervorgegangen ist, und

1 Man vergleiche mit den Wegen nach Weimar etwa die Shelburne Essays von Paul
Elmer More und man versteht den Unterschied zwischen deutscher und amerikanischer
Literaturbetrachtung besser. Bei More zuerst englische dann amerikanische Litera-
tur, dann Philosophic aus England und Amerika. auch etwas Griechenland, aus Frank-
reich Pascal, Rousseau, Ste. Beuve, schliesslich Tolstoy und Nietzsche. In Band VI ist
deutsche Religionsphilosophie, ohne Prage die bedeutendste unter den modernen, nicht
einmal erwahnt.

553

154 F. SCHOENEMANN

nicht zuletzt eine neue tiefe und echt Lienhardsche Erlauterung von
Goethes Faust.1 In dem Buch iiber Das klassische Weimar lesen
wir z.B.: "Darin gerade besteht die Aufgabe des Klassizismus
(Schiller-Goethe), dem Poesie mehr ist als Unterhaltung, mehr als
schone Form, mehr als Schilderungswerk und Problematik, in
welch letzteren Dingen so viele von uns stecken bleiben, ohne ins
Freie zu gelangen: in das Land der klaren Ruhe und des tiefen
Vertrauens." Das stimmt uberein mit einem schonen Wort aus
dem ersten Band der Wege nach Weimar: "Poesie offnet sich nur
dem Glaiibigen, d.h. der herzlichen Unbefangenheit, der offenen
Seele."

Lienhards reifstes und gelesenstes Buch ist endlich Oberlin,
Roman aus der Revolutionszeit im Elsass. Das ist nicht nur ein
Heimatroman im Sinne etwa von Frenssens Jorn Uhl, sondern ein
bedeutender Kulturroman, in dem wir viel zum Verstandnis der
Zeit von Schiller und Goethe lernen konnen, und er wird so schliess-
lich ein Bekenntnis zum deutschen Idealismus, wie Lienhard ihn in
seinen Prosaschriften immer und immer wieder vertreten hat. So
hiess es am zusammenfassendsten in einem Vortrag von Jahre 1910:
Was ist deutscher Idealismus ?, den man auch in den Neuen Idealen
findet: "Deutscher Idealismus ist Besiegung der deutschen Schwere.
Durch welche Mittel? Durch die rhythmische Kraft eines reinen
Herzens und grosser Gedanken!"

Das innere Ziel dieser Geschichte ist Johann Friedrich Oberlin, der
von 1740 bis 1826 im Elsass lebte, ein bedeutender Pfarrer und unge-
wohnlicher Mann. "Es ist die Geschichte eines jungen Elsassers,
des Kandidaten Viktor Hartmann, der aus anfanglich dumpfen und
verworrenen Zustanden zu Oberlins Ruhe und Reife hinanwachst."
So schreibt der Verfasser selbst im Vorwort zu seinem Roman. Der
Roman gliedert sich in drei Bucher, diese entsprechen drei seelischen
Stufen und Seelenstimmungen. Zuerst die breit behagliche asthe-
tisch empfindsame Zeit vor der franzosischen Revolution, dann die
Revolution in Strassburg, in dem die Geburtsstunde der Marseil-
laise und der Dichter Rouget de PIsle geschildert sind, und endlich

1 Seitdem ist noch von Lienhard erschienen: Deutsche Dichtung in ihren geschicht-
lichen Grundziigen dargestellt (Leipzig, 1917), bei Quelle & Meyer, als Band 150 von der
Sammlung " Wissenschaf t und Bildung."

554

FRIEDRICH LIENHARDS LITERATURBETRACHTUNG

155

Steintal, d.h. die religiose deutschelsassische Stimmung nach der
Revolution. Der Roman hat vielen Gehalt an Schonheit und
Tiefsinn, seine Luft ist bei aller Darstellung tiefster Seelenprobleme
rein, da es keine artistische Erotik darin gibt. Seine Menschen
wachsen alle vom Grenzland hinaus und ins Hochland hinein: "in
das Land der grossen Herzen .... worin es weder Angst noch
Hass noch Tod gibt, sondern Mut und Leben, Licht und Liebe!"
Und das Geheimnis Oberlins und zugleich Lienhards Wunsch wird
in dem Satz ausgesprochen : "In stiller Tatigkeit und vornehmer
Gesinnung sein Leben auch im Kleinen fur das grosse Ganze bedeut-
end zu machen — kann es ein reineres Gliick geben?!"

Still und einsam sind Lienhards Lieblingsbegriffe. Von "moder-
ner Vereinsamung " redet ein Aufsatz im I. Bande der Wege nach
Weimar und fordert "eine Umgestaltung des ganzen Zeitgeistes,"
aber "keine Weltflucht, sondern ein Sich-Selber-Finden." Die-
selbe Forderung von steter, stiller Selbstzucht bringen die Neuen
Ideate verschiedentlich zum Ausdruck, beispielsweise : "Wer es mit
seinem Volke und dessen Kultur und Literatur ernst meint, Her muss
sich vor alien Dingen zu einer gewissen — ich sage nur: zu einer
gewissen — Einsamkeit erziehen. Anders ist ein Beherrschen und
tlberschauen nicht moglich!" Von solcher edlen Einsamkeit redet
nun auch sein letztes Buch, dessen Vorwort von Oktober 1914
stammt: Der Einsiedler und sein Volk.1 Es ist eine Sammlung von
Erzahlungen, denen die erste Geschichte, eine Art Kriegsbekenntnis
Lienhards, den Titel gegeben hat. Die beste Erzahlung darin
heisst: Aus Taulers Tagen, eine historische Novelle tiber einen von
Lienhards Lieblingshelden aus dem Elsass der Mystik. "Den

Sinn des Lebens kann man nur erleben, nicht erlernen Und

dazu gehort, dass unser Gemiit selber auf den stillen Grund getaucht
sei." Wir sind wieder auf dem Wege nach Weimar.

Zusammenfassend konnte man sagen, dass Lienhard als Lyriker
wie als Dramatiker von edler Zartheit und Keuschheit des Empfin-
dens ist, im Gefiihlsausdruck herb, ja streng, voll von reinstem
Wollen und von hohen wlirdigen Gedanken, ein Dichter der ewigen

1 Lienhard hat 1919 einen Roman aus dem gegenwartigen Elsass: Westmark veroffent-
licht, der einen nachhaltigen Eindruck gemacht hat und viel gelesen wird, deshalb
besondere Aufmerksamkeit verdient.

555

156 'F. SCHOENEMANN

seelischen Sehnsucht, der Klarheit und Liebe, der Stille und Einsam-
keit. Sein grosster Gegensatz in der modernen deutschen Literatur
durfte Gerhart Hauptmann sein, was ein Vergleich von Lienhards
Dichtung Odysseus auf Ithaca (1911) mit Hauptmanns Der Bogen
des Odysseus (1913) ebenso interessant wie lehrreich beweisen kann.1
Das sollte wenigstens ein Ergebnis zeitigen, dass man die modernste
deutsche Literatur nicht mehr nur nach Hauptmann sondern auch
nach Lienhard beurteilen muss. Lienhard ist nicht immer naiv-
schaffender Dichter. Er erreicht sein Hochstes nicht oft, weil er
zu viel denkt, d.h. als formender Kiinstler zu viel denkt, zu viel
griibeln und Ergriibeltes aussprechen will. Aber alles was er sagt
ist bedeutend als Ausdruck einer harmonischen mannlichen Person-
lichkeit. Was etwa Rudolf Eucken als Denker fur die neudeutsche
Weltanschauungskunde bedeutet, was etwa Oskar Walzel in unserm
eigensten Fachgebiet als literarischer Kritiker darstellt, das leistet
Friedrich Lienhard fur die Literaturbetrachtung in einem allge-
meinen Sinn, und zwar als ktinstlerische Personlichkeit. Doch
wahrend Oskar Walzel z.B. Kunstverstand ist, dessen Ziel aller dings
Starkung des ktinstlerischen Gefiihls sein will, also vertieftes Kunst-
verstandnis, vertritt Friedrich Lienhard fiihlendes Dichtertum
.... das voile frische Herz. Und gerade heute, wenn deutsche
Forscher dem Problem der " Kunstlerischen Form des Dichtwerks"
nachspiiren, brauchen wir eine Dichterpersonlichkeit wie Lienhard
zum Heifer und Anreger. Gerade Friedrich Lienhards Literatur-
betrachtung kann uns Lehrenden und Lernenden das eine Grosse
vermitteln, dass es in der Kunst wie in der Kunstkritik nicht auf
die analytische Schilderung ankommt, sondern vielmehr auf das
Ringen um ein Ideal. Der Wissenschaftler wie der Kiinstler muss
etwas sein — das blosse Wissen oder Konnen geniigt nicht.

F. SCHOENEMANN
HARVARD UNIVERSITY, 1913-20
ADOLFSTRASSE 54, KIEL, GERMANY

i Siehe jetzt die Greifswalder Dissertation von P. Gaude: Das Odysseusthema in der
neueren deutschen Literatur besonders bei G. Hauptmann und F. Lienhard. Leipzig, 1916.
Verlag G. Fock.

556

NIFLANT, IFLANT

Do sprach von Nlflande Morunc der junge man
The name Niflant in the above line from Kudrun (211, 1) is
generally recognized as a variant form of Livland, and Martin, in
his note on the passage, cites a number of other literary monuments
in which this spelling occurs. It seems not to ha,ve been noticed,
however, that Nifflant is the only form found in the Statutes of the
Teutonic Order, under whose dominion Livland remained for several
centuries. This document, promulgated by the Grand Master
Werner von Orseln, is dated September 17, 1329. Its dialect is
Middle German:

Auch so mach derselbe meister zu Duitschen landen .... den meister

zu Nifflant auch in mitwissen lassen haben (p. 233) dez meisters

zu Duitschen landen und Nifflanden (p. 235) verhengnisze eins

meisters van Duitschen landen und auch eins meisters zu Nifflanden (ibid.)
ein meister van Nifflant mit alien sinen und anderen gebietgern des landes

zu Prusen (ibid.) der gebietiger und brueder vanPruesen, auch van

Nifflant (p. 240). Wie ein meister zu Nifflant auch ein mitwissen mag und

sal haben (p. 241) die wile ein meister zu Nifflant auch der oberste

gebietiger einer ist (ibid.) mach er den meister zu Nifflant, der do

zu den zeiten isz, beruffen (ibid.). Ob aber derselbe meister zu Niffland
nicht komen en moichte (p. 242). Were auch sache das derselbe meister
zu Nifflant .... nicht queme . . . . als were der meister zu Nifflant
.... selbe gheenwartich gewiest .... als were der meister zu Nifflant
.... gegenwirtich (ibid.) prueder Eberhart van Minheim, meister zu
Nifflant (p. 243) -1

The form Liflant, while frequent in other documents of this
period, does not occur at all in these Statutes, which long continued
to be the fundamental law of the Teutonic Order. Nifflant, there-
fore, instead of being a mere sporadic variant, is to be regarded as
a regular, current form. An off-shoot from the spelling Niflant,
namely Iflant, Ifflant, seems hitherto to have escaped notice, despite
the fact that it occurs very frequently in documents of the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. The earliest instances are in a legal summons

i Published in F. G. v. Bunge's Lie-, Est- und Curldndisches Urkundenbuch, Zweiter
Band, Reval, 1855, pp. 233 fl.
557] 157 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, February, 1921

158 W- KURRELMEYER

addressed to the Teutonic Order by Magnus, Bishop of Westeras,
under date of September 15, 1354:

.... und alien brudern und iren icklichem in Iflande wesenden (ac
fratribus universis et cuilibet ipsorum, per Liwniam constitutis) , (Bunge, II,
596). czerungen und becostungen czu den teilen kegen Iflant (p. 598).
ufgehalden, gewangen, ader welcherwis bekumert in der jegent Iflande
(p. 601).

In the year 1370, King Waldemar of Denmark addresses a letter
to the "ratman der gemeinen stede van der Wend siden, von Prusen,
von Yflande und von der Sudirse" (Bunge, VI, 658).

In 1387 the Master of the Order in Livonia sends instructions to
his representative at the Papal Court, in which the form Ifland is
used exclusively:

mitzamt unsem vulbort und unser mitgebitiger zu Ifland (Bunge, III,
545). unser brudere in Iflande (ibid.), eine zuvorsicht unsers ordens in
Iflande (ibid), unser mitgebitiger in Ifland (p. 546). uf die materie der
zachen unseres bannes in Ifland (ibid.), zu uns in Iflande (p. 547). uns und
unsern orden in Iflande (ibid.).

Similarly, in the official correspondence of the Emperor Sigis-
mund the spelling Ifland, together with its variants (Yflant, Yffland,
Yflannd), is almost exclusively used, a single instance of Leyffland
constituting the exception :

den ganczen Deutschen orden in Preussen und ouch in Yffland (Bunge,
VII, 94: dated 1424). prelaten, in Preussen und in Yffland geseszen
(p. 95). den erwirdigen hoemeistern in Preussen und in Yffland und irem
orden (ibid.), der erwirdig meister von Yflant Deutsches ordens (VIII, 55:
1429). der lande czuPrussen und czu Yffland (VIII, 454: 1434). meister
von Leyffland .... hertzog Swidrigal und den Yfflenndern .... dem
meister von Yflannd (pp. 542 f.: 1435). die niderlag des erwirdigen meisters
von Ifland (p. 618: 1435). von der Yfflender wegen (p. 619). ouch der
ritterschafft und steten in Inland (Monumenta,1 XIV, 533: 1435). dem
groszfursten und dem meister von Yffland (p. 544).

In a letter of September 6, 1434, addressed to the Grand Master
by Hans Balg (Bunge, VIII, 499-501), we note the forms czu Yflande,
von Yflande, dy Yflender, dy Iflander, dy Ifflender, czti, Yflande, von
Iflant, dy Iflander, dy Iflander, mit den Iflender. The form von
Yfflanden is found in Bunge, IX, 133 (1437), while ken Yfflandt, in
Yfflandt occur four times in a document of the year 1449 (Bunge, X,
455). This list may be concluded by noting the additional forms

1 Monumenta medii aevi historica res gestas Poloniae illustrantia, Tomus XIV,
Cracoviae, 1894.

558

NIFLANT, IFLANT 159

marschalk van Iffelant and marschalk von Iffilant (Monumenla,
XIV, 512 f.: 1431).

As to dialect, it may be noted that the form Ifland, like its
predecessor Niffland, occurs almost exclusively in Middle and Upper
German documents, whereas Low German texts always have Lifland,
or a similar spelling with initial L. The two forms Ifland and
Lifland hardly ever appear in the same document — the most striking
exception to this statement is to be noted in a letter of the year 1410,
in which there are also other indications of a mixture of dialects
(Middle and Low German) :

dat ir mir behulplich sin an den mester von Yfflande, das her mich zo
wissen do (Bunge, IV, 746). Dar uf ret ik an euwir genate ind noch euwirn
willen to Lifflande (ibid.), di mich obir gengen obir al Yfland (p. 747).
das ich ene erfolget hette in Yfland (ibid.). So bin ich uis Yffland geriten
ind en ger nicht mer (ibid.).

The spellings Niffland, Iffland, Iffelant, Iffilant, and the like would
seem to indicate a short stem- vowel : on the other hand, only a long
stem-vowel could have produced the diphthongized form Eifland.
Hud. Hildebrand,1 who cites this form from a text of the sixteenth
century, explains it by positing a form Neifland, which lost its N
through combinations like von Neifland, in Neifland. As far as I
know, not a single instance of Neifland can be cited; nor is it neces-
sary now to posit this form, as Ifland with which Hildebrand was
unacquainted, sufficiently accounts for Eifland. The loss of the
initial N is paralleled in the name of Heinrich von Notleben, which
is found in Bunge in more than a dozen different spellings, including
Otleben (IX, 222), Otleyben (p. 334), and Otloffen (p. 177). Similarly,
the name of the county of Ortenau in Baden had, as late as the
fifteenth century, an initial M: Mordenau, Mortenau.2

The following early instances of Eifland, Eifldnder, Eifldndisch
majr be noted:

daz die Eyflender die selbin weile in dem lande gehert haben .... do
sie in das lant komen, do worin die Eyflender weg (Monumenta, VI, 185:
1409). der kompthur czum Elbinge ken Eyffland (Bunge, X, 220: 1447).
das dye cleynen freyen .... ken Eyfland mit nichte czyen wellen (p. 224).
was mich dy Eyfflendesche reysze gekost hat (p. 454: 1449). uff die
Eyfflandesche hervart (ibid.).

1 "Zur Gudrun," Zeitschr. /. deutsche Phil., II, 477.

2 Publikationen aus den Preuss. Staatsarchiven, LIX, 565.

559

160 ^. KURRELMEYER

The last variant to be noted is Eyfenland, in a text of the year
1432: "sageten, her were dovon komen und kein Eyfenland
geflogen."1

As giving a possible clue to the origin of the form Nifland, Martin,
in the note referred to above, states that the Russian name of the
province is Infland. I am unable to confirm this, as the Russian
dictionaries at my command give only Liwonja or Lifljandja; in
Polish, however, the form Inflanty is regularly used, occurring
frequently, for example, in Vol. VI of the Monumenta:

aby zbrojnie kroczyli do Inflant (p. 42). gdy i mistrz Inflancki jego
poddanym dozwolil tegoz w Inflanciech (p. 49). Mistrz Inflancki Dietrich
Tork przyrzeka w. ks. Witoldowi (p. 304).

W. KURRELMEYER

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

1 Scriptorea rerum Sileaiacarum, VI, 116.

560

REVIEWS AND NOTICES

Theodor Fontane: A Critical Study. By KENNETH HAYENS. Lon-
don: W. Collins & Co., 1920.

The technical side of novel-writing has elicited in recent years an uncom-
mon amount of scholarly interest. A bibliography of essays, largely doctoral
dissertations from German universities, which deal with the more technical
aspects of the novelist's craft, has swelled to considerable proportions.
Many of these essays bear, as far as general method and use of terminology
are concerned, a recognizable relationship to Robert Riemann's Goethes
Romantechnik (1902). Studies, more or less technical, in the art of fiction
or the methods of individual novelists were, of course, available previous
to the publication of Riemann's work, such as Spielhagen's Beitrage zur
Theorie und Technik des Romans (1883), and indeed by 1915 in such numbers
as to justify M. L. Wolff in writing a history of the theory of the novel
(Geschichte der Romantheorie) , but in providing a systematic method of inves-
tigation, a classification of the various elements of technique in a form at
once graspable and generally applicable, Riemann appears much in the
light of a pioneer. Obviously the novel can never be reduced to so compact
a formula as that which Freytag with some plausibility derived from his
study of the drama, yet the detailed studies of Romantechnik may eventually
afford the possibility of a synthesis of general principles as to the craft of the
novelist which, substantially attested and documented, may be of very great
value. A recent addition to the studies of the German novel, to a large
extent on the technical side, is Kenneth Hayens's Theodor Fontane: A
Critical Study (London, 1920) — Hayens is Lecturer in German Language
and Literature at University College, Dundee.

Hayens's prefatory note contains his bibliography. A selected bibliog-
raphy is open to criticism both for inclusions and omissions, and satisfies
perhaps no one except the compiler. Hayens' bibliography contains only
ten items; several of them are references to such general and obvious
authorities as the histories of literature by Meyer, Stern, and Biese, or
Mielke's Der deutsche Roman; he uses one item to condemn Pineau's L 'Evo-
lution du Roman en Allemagne au XIXe Siecle as valueless for the study of
Fontane, and at the end he notes several magazine articles which he charac-
terizes mildly as "not unsuggestive." The student of Fontane would
doubtless recommend various substitutions or additions, such as, perhaps,
the essays of Ettlinger (Berlin, 1904) and F. Servaes (Berlin, without date).
In view of the fact that Hayens is so largely concerned with the technique of
Fontane's stories, one misses a reference to Kricker's study in the Bonner
561] 161 [MoDEEN PHILOLOGY, February, 1921

162 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

Forschungen: Theodor Fontane, von seiner Art und epischen Kunst (1912),
in which Kricker has trodden some kindred pathways before Hayens and
brings forward a good deal of highly interesting material. Perhaps the
most conspicuous omission is that of Dresch's book Le Roman Social en
Allemagne 1850-1900 (Paris, 1903), which devoted 128 pages to Fontane,
the most extended account of Fontane's novels before Wandrey's Theodor
Fontane (Miinchen, 1919); the latter probably appeared too late for Hayens
to include.

Despite the inclusive promise of the title, Hayens's study deals only
with Fontane as a novelist; in a brief introduction he compresses into the
space of six pages a biography of Fontane and a survey, hardly more than
an enumeration, of his non-fictional work. Because of this brevity, he fails
to give appropriate emphasis to various avenues of approach to Fontane's
real career, for example, his apprenticeship to narrative writing in his
ballads. For the practical purpose of chapter divisions Hayens is naturally
obliged to abandon Meyer's simple classification of the novels under two
heads, " criminal novels" and "modern novels" (experimentelle, social-
psychologische, kulturhistorische), and considers the stories under the
following headings: " The Historical Novelist," "The Story-teller," "The
New World," "Berlin Plutocracy," "Unequal Marriages," "Sentiment and
Society," "Poor Nobility," "A Liberal Conservative." This grouping of
the novels which violates the chronological sequence of their publication
would be the natural procedure, were Hayens concerned exclusively with
the themes of the stories and not with their technique, but this plan is likely
to lead to some confusion in those passages where Hayens calls attention
to the development of Fontane's technical methods; for example, in the
chapter "The Historical Novelist" Hayens frequently compares Schach
von Wuthenow with Vor dem Sturm, not simply as historical novels but in
matters of technique, ignoring the fact that three novels were published
between these two; unless the reader holds the chronological table in mind,
he will probably gain the impression that Schach von Wuthenow was Fontane's
second novel. In general Hayens shows a tendency to limit his comparisons
to the group of stories which he considers in an individual chapter. It may
be questioned also whether the unimportant novel Quitt deserves a chapter
for itself, a doubt which is scarcely met by Hayens's plea that an author's
failures merit study as well as his successes or that the book deserves special
notice because of the novelty of the American scenes.

In his analysis of Fontane's novels Hayens tests each story on a series
of points which he has chosen as constituting the technique of novel- writing;
his method is simple and generally sound. He gives a brief outline of the
plot which will serve for those who have never read the novels as an accurate
indication of the kind of story which Fontane was wont to tell. Then the
investigator analyzes each of the more important characters, and devotes
a few words of comment to the minor personages; and by reference to

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 163

interpretative parallels and contrasts he opens the way for the establish-
ment of general principles as to Fontane's favorite types and the strata of
society from which his people are taken. He discusses also the various
settings used in the stories, whether both outdoor and indoor scenes are
used and in what relative proportions, and he compares one novel with
others in this regard. Hayens fails to note Fontane's peculiar fondness for
naming the pictures on the walls of his indoor settings; in this practice
Fontane doubtless approaches the milieu-theorists and he probably derived
from them an unconscious sense of the importance of this element in the
setting.

Each novel is tested under the heading "proportion"; this consists in a
quantitative measurement of the amount of recorded conversation as com-
pared with the space devoted to action or reflective comment. Thus he
says of L'Adultera (p. 131) : "The general proportion of the novel is destroyed
by the complete overshadowing of the action by the speech," — a statement
which Hayens makes in varying form in nearly every chapter of his book,
though he fails to develop a theory as to the appropriate proportion of these
elements. As a matter of fact this preponderance of conversation is the
keynote of Fontane's realism; as in "real life," Fontane acquaints us with
his people largely through what they say and what others say of them, and
he is loath to assume the omniscience of the novelist who tells us what goes
on behind the spoken word. In comment on the conversation as such,
Hayens is sensible and acute in opposing the views frequently expressed to
the effect that all of Fontane's characters talk alike without differentiation
of speech, save for the few who, not always consistently, use dialect.

Hayens examines the different novels as to the number of characters in
the different scenes and establishes Fontane's preference for scenes with
only two persons or for considerably larger groups, his dislike of scenes
with three or four persons. Discussion is also applied to Fontane's use of
inserted letters, a practice which is with him more frequent than in the
average modern novel, to the introduction of "extraneous matter," a point
upon which a more precise definition of the term would seem to be required,
the use of inserted poems, to passages where the author seems to take the
reader into his confidence, and to the employment of foreign words; the
latter are weighed quantitatively in each book, though Hayens does not
indicate whether or not he has used Albin Schultz's dissertation Das Fremd-
wort bei Theodor Fontane (Greifswald, 1913). A further subject for dis-
cussion is the choice of title and of the names chosen for the characters.
Hayens comments on the connotation or suggestiveness of names with con-
siderable sensitiveness, but one wonders why he dismisses Stine as uninter-
esting in this regard, with Baron Papageno and Frau Pittelkow to uphold
his theories.

In this study of technique there are unquestionably occasional lapses
into platitudes and trivialities; Hayens is minded to make his study exhaustive

563

164 RWIEWS AND NOTICES

and, quite legitimately, has an eye to completeness even at the risk of
including the petty. One interesting and characteristic element of Fontane's
novels is overlooked or fails to receive due emphasis, namely, his use of the
so-called "Leitmotiv/' or of the foreshadowing suggestion, which is closely
related to it. Hayens's attention might have been called to this rather
noteworthy characteristic of Fontane's style by R. Sternfeld's essay "Das
Leitmotiv bei Theodor Fontane" (Beilage, Vossische Zeitung, No. 343,
1910) -1 In several cases the investigator notes that Fontane ignores those
climaxes of action which other novelists would have made the chief objects
of their interest. This practice Hayens either does not interpret at all or
explains unsatisfactorily; for example, in one instance, by attributing to
Fontane's age his lack of interest in crises where the grand passion is involved.
As a matter of fact again, these omissions indicate quite clearly certain con-
ceptions of Fontane's as to the functions of the novel; he is not primarily
concerned with great dramatic moments — that he leaves to the dramatist;
he is mainly interested in processes of development which may lead up to
them or result from them.

The concluding chapter will seem to most readers to be somewhat
inadequate. Many general statements are scattered through the book, as
it occurs to Hayens to generalize from points made with reference to a
particular novel, for example, Fontane's comparative failure in depicting
children; but he does not draw these fragments of a general characterization
into a clear outline of his author in his final summation. Though Hayens
remarks in his preface that Fontane is the chief German realist of the -nine-
teenth century, he gives nowhere a clear conception of what he understands
by realism nor how Fontane fulfils it. Hayens mentions Fontane's rela-
tionship to certain other novelists, his predecessors and contemporaries,
such as Alexis, Hesekiel, Mauthner, and Lindau; he comments on a possible
relationship to Young Germany on the one hand and to Zola and the Natural-
ists on the other, but in general his references are too brief to convey a really
adequate or substantiated conception of how Fontane resembled or differed
from those whose themes or whose methods were such as to make a com-
parison with Fontane's work significant, or to show Fontane's relation to his
environment and the more important literary movements of his day. A
much more detailed investigation of these problems would have enhanced
the value of Hayens's book. In regard to social and literary backgrounds
and Fontane's relationship to them, and, indeed, concerning various points
of the novelist's technique, the volumes of Fontane's correspondence afford
invaluable suggestions; Hayens directs attention to Fontane's autobio-
graphical works but he does not seem to have used the abundant testimony
of the correspondence as to Fontane's own estimate of values. The

i In a paper entitled "The Leitmotiv in German Literature" and read by Professor
E. S. Meyer before the meeting of the Modern Language Association, Philadelphia,
December 28, 1912, particular emphasis was laid on Pontane's use of this device.

564

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 165

significance of the final chapter would be much increased by a more extended
attempt to sum up Fontane's character as a novelist, his temper and per-
sonality, the ideas and conceptions of life which underlie his novels, and his
relationship to his world. Some of these points are admirably covered by
Wandrey in his chapter entitled "Die geistige Personlichkeit." Hayens
controls his material with considerable skill, varying the order of the differ-
ent elements of his investigation and enlivening the substance with illustra-
tions. But, it would seem, the book fails to satisfy completely either of
the two classes for which such a study might seem to be designed, the real
student of the technique of fiction, particularly German fiction, and the
general reading public which seeks merely a second-hand acquaintance with
an important foreign author. Yet, as has been suggested above, Hayens's
study contains unquestionably much which is interesting and stimulating
to both types of readers.

HARVEY W. THAYER
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

The Origin of the German Carnival Comedy. BY MAXIMILIAN J.
RUDWIN. New York: G. E. Stechert & Co., 1920. Pp. xii+85.

Man is forever fascinated by the search for origins. During the last
half-century or so his tireless effort to penetrate into that confused labyrinth,
primitive mind, has thrown much new and interesting light upon the great
nucleus of all religion and art, the annual spring festival. The kernel of
this universal vegetation or life-festival was everywhere the ritual celebration
of the death, resurrection, and marriage of the life-dispensing Fertility-
Spirit or Year-Spirit. Out of this ritual the drama developed: tragedy,
as also comedy.

Since the investigations of Mannhardt, and since the application of
his basic vegetation-spirit theory by Frazer in his Golden Bough, this con-
nection of both tragedy and comedy with the rites and customs of the spring
festival has become more and more manifest. Notwithstanding the ancestor-
worship theory upheld by a few, the inclusive formulations of Jane Harrison
and Gilbert Murray as regards classic tragedy, and of Cornford as regards
classic comedy, are increasingly convincing.

In the discussions regarding the origin of our modern Teutonic, in
particular English and German, drama, its patent association with the
liturgical performances of biblical scenes in the Christian churches, and the
later direct influence upon it of finished classical tragedy and comedy, have
been stressed. There has as yet been no adequate realization of its still
more fundamental connection with native tragic and comic forms, as deter-
mined by the native primitive spring ritual. The rapid development of
the liturgical scenes into great mystery cycles played processionally, each
year, by the town guilds in the town's public places, has always seemed

565

166 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

astonishing; and the fact that these cycles contained surprisingly rich
presentations of contemporary life, both tragic and comic, has likewise
been unexplained. The evolution of the farcical English interludes, of the
morality plays, and of the characteristic English chronicle histories has
always remained obscure.

Lately, however, investigators have begun to recognize the more funda-
mental native folk-determination of both the tragic and the comic scenes
included in the great cycles, scenes so easily detachable often from the biblical
context. Katherine Lee Bates, in her book The English Religious Drama still
makes the traditional and superficially sweeping statement that "the
romantic drama, born of the church and nourished by the church, came in time,
as it acquired an independent life, and gradually passed from sacred to secular
uses, to incur the hostility of the parent-bird, whose plumage its mischievous
activity loved to ruffle." However, the beginnings made by Creizenach
in discussing sword-plays, mummers' plays, and so forth, have been developed
by Chambers, who has taken into account suggestions from the Golden
Bough; yet he none the less fails to experience the full force of his own
researches. Dr. Rudwin, on the other hand, after a thorough investigation
into the origins of the drama in the West as in the East, reaches the following
definite conclusion: "It would appear from the facts deduced that the ....
folkplay has contributed more than the 'tiniest rill' (as Chambers puts it)
to the mighty stream of modern drama. "

Dr. Rudwin's book, therefore, is a most welcome sign of the times;
a welcome beginning made in the careful investigation of a specific type,
produced in the evolution of our modern drama. Even though Dr. Rudwin
has confined himself to the German Fastnachtsspiel, his investigation throws
light upon the whole problem, and suggests the timeliness of similar investi-
gations for the farcical English interludes, and further for the morality plays,
the chronicle histories, and, indeed, the entire "romantic" English or even
European drama. There are phenomena and speeches in Shakespeare's
plays which make it seem likely that the forms of Shakespearean tragedy and
comedy were developments of the ritual of the native Spring Festival.1
Thus Dr. Rudwin's book is of fundamental importance to anyone interested
in the English drama, or in modern drama generally.

Dr. Rudwin starts from the now generally accepted assumption that
the secular scenes developed independently of the liturgical plays, and
attempts to discover the specific pagan ceremonies in which they may have
originated. He assembles the meager records of Teutonic folk-customs of
the past, supplements them by facts found in the practices and superstitions
of the peasants of today, and compares them further with the customs
and usages of present primitive peoples. Thus he tells of the annual ship-
procession; of the death and resurrection and sacred marriage of the male

1 The present writer is preparing a study of Shakespeare's plays approached from
this point of view.

566

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 167

and female Fertility-Spirits; of the driving out of Winter or Death, and the
bringing in of Summer or Life ; and he tells, above all, of the dances, fooleries,
and riotings of accompanying minor spirits.

The carnival season, Dr. Rudwin maintains, was a pagan carousing
festival connected with the carrus navalis of ship-cart, symbol everywhere
of the female Fertility-Spirit. The central fact of this universal agricultural
festival, he says, was the ship-procession. Every spring, or Lent (the German
Lenz\ the ship was led in procession from place to place, in order to induce
magically the renewal of life. This cart contained the emblem of fertility,
or images of impersonations of the male or female Fertility-Spirits, either
singly or together. It was drawn by beasts or humans, and accompanied by
numerous other embodiments of fertility-power: these were the lesser
spirits1 who disported themselves in the manner of exuberant clowns, fools,
or devils, doctors, priests, braggart soldiers, witches, scolds, all of these
performing magical actions originally calculated to help along the new
season's fertility. The author further gives a full description of these
various Fertility-Spirits, discusses the black color of some of them, the caps
and bells, the leaf-garments, the animal masks, the masks of death. Another
part of this festival was the important ritual of the death and revival of
the Fertility-God; by this death and resurrection ceremony primitive man
explained the death and growth of vegetation. The mock killing of the
leaf-clad mummer and his revival by the all-potent doctor was a necessary
step toward rebirth in a younger and fresher form. A variant of the death
and resurrection is the separation of the single Year-Spirit into two opposing
principles — into a Winter or Death, and a Summer or Life; in this form
Winter is driven out -and Summer is brought in; or there is a contest between
these two principles, between them singly or between the groups. Finally,
likewise important in the ritual of the spring festival, was the celebration
of a sacred marriage between the male and female Fertility-Spirits, accom-
panied by wholesale matings among the mummers and dancers and indeed
all the celebrants.

After having given this detailed background, Dr. Rudwin nevertheless
says that he does not believe that the carnival plays are direct outgrowths
of any part of the actual ritual drama. "We can have drama only," the
author insists, "when a wholly new content has been given to the ritual.
.... The ritual part cannot be used, above all, for the comical drama."
He suggests, however, that the secular plays developed, if not out (of the
sacred acts, at least out of the supplementary episodes extraneous to the
magical rites. The fertility mummers, he thinks, who began by performing
magical ceremonies intended to fertilize the earth and its varied life, very
soon imitated and ridiculed individuals in the onlooking throng, and occupied
themselves with the characters and conflicts of ordinary human life. Thus

»Dr. Rudwin calls them demons, but this term gives a false impression; it seems
better to call them spirits.

567

168 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

the needed new content was provided. The author believes he has found
parallels among the ancient Athenians and present-day American Indians.
Of course, these buffoons also borrowed themes and types from the ritual
drama; and this fact makes the preceding full discussion of the spring
customs necessary and valuable. The obscenity of the medieval drama
must be explained, Dr. Rudwin thinks, by its origin as a part of the fertility
ceremonies.

Undoubtedly Dr. Rudwin fails to appreciate the importance of the
ritual drama as to its influence in molding the plot-formulas of tragedy and
comedy. This, however, can be explained by the fact that he has given
his specific attention to the farcical carnival plays of Germany. His analysis,
nevertheless, illuminates most interestingly the development of realistic
comic scenes on the medieval stage, and also the fascinating type of the fool,
who in Shakespeare is lifted into truly cosmic significance far removed and
yet identical with his no less cosmic origin.

Thus Dr. Rudwin's study is the first definite clear attempt to show the
continuous development of Teutonic drama out of native pagan traditions,
in particular, the traditions connected with the ritual of the spring festival.
It is greatly to be hoped that similar investigations will indeed be made for
English tragedy and comedy, forms so much more important and interesting
than the likewise important and interesting German Fastnachtsspiel studied
in Dr. Rudwin's monograph.

LOUISE MALLINCKRODT KUEFFNER

HUNTER COLLEGE

NEW YORK CITY

568

Modern Philology

VOLUME XVIII March IQ2I NUMBER n

"AND THE EVENING AND THE MORNING WERE

ONE DAY"
Paradiso, XXVII, 136-38

St. Augustine tells us that the angels are not omitted from the
account of the creation in Genesis, but where it is said: "In the
beginning God created the heaven and the earth," "heaven" sig-
nifies spiritual beings in a potential state, just as "earth" signifies
material creatures in an unformed state. And where it is said:
"And God said, Let there be light; and there was light," the word
"light" signifies the angels in their actual condition.1

.... non mihi videtur ab operibus Dei absurda sententia, si cum
lux ilia prima facta est, Angeli creati intelliguntur, et inter sanctos Angelos
et immundos fuisse discretum, ubi dictum est: "Et divisit Deus inter
lucem et tenebras; et vocavit Deus lucem diem, et tenebras vocavit noc-
tem "2

The light, then, and the day are the angels, and the darkness and the
night are the sinning angels, as soon as they are separated from
the good. So also says St. Isidore: "Angelica natura, quae non est

iCf. Aquinas Summa Theologica, I, Qu. LXVII, Art. IV: "Augustinus enlm
(De Civ. Dei Lib. XI, cap. ix et xxxiii) videtur dicere quod non fuerit conveniens
Moysem praetermisisse spiritualis creaturae productionem. Et ideo dicit quod cum
dicitur : In principio creavit Deus coelum et terrain, per coelum intelligitur materia informis
corporalis creaturae. Et quia natura spiritualis dignior est quam corporalis, fuit prius
formanda. Formatio igitur spiritualis naturae significatur in productione lucis, ut
intelligatur de luce spirituali. Formatio enim naturae spiritualis est per hoc quod
illuminatur ut adhaeret Verbo Dei."

2 S. Aur. Augustini De Civitate Dei Lib. XI, cap. xix. Op. omn. ed. Caillau and
GuUlon, Paris, 1836, Vol. Ill, p. 32.
5g9] 113 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, March, 1921

114 J. E. SHAW

prevaricata, lux dicitur; ilia autem quae prevaricata est tenebrarum
nomine nuncupatur. Unde et in principio lux a tenebris dividitur."1
This was a favorite idea with St. Augustine, which he discusses
in many chapters of his De Genesi ad litteram and his De Civitate Dei
as well as in other works; and with it is intimately connected his
doctrine of the "evening and morning knowledge" of the angels.
For how came it that some of the angels deviated from the light,
became darkness, and were called "night"; while the others were
called "day"? It happened in this way: The angels (who are
altogether spiritual creatures, and so do not understand by means
of abstractions from sense-images, as do human beings) have two
lands of knowledge. They see all things, including themselves, as
they are in the Divine Wisdom which creates them, by gazing
directly upon the light of Divine Wisdom, and this is their more
perfect kind of knowledge. They also see all things, including
themselves, as these creatures are in themselves, and this is their
less perfect kind of knowledge. The more perfect is called "morn-
ing" knowledge, the less perfect "evening" knowledge.2 When
God said "Let there be light" he recalled his spiritual creatures
from their contemplation of themselves as they were in themselves,
to the contemplation of all things in him, and all but a minority
converted their gaze upon him, gratefully acknowledging their own
being from him, and ascribing all the creation to his praise. They
thus acquired their full perfection.3 The minority, on the con-
trary, refused to convert their gaze upon him, but continued to
contemplate themselves and the rest of the creation as they were

1 S. Isidori Sententiarum Lib. I, cap. viii, Op. omn. (ed. Migne), Tom. V, No. 129.

2 Aquinas Summa Theologica, I, Qu. LVII, Art. VI: " Respondeo dicendum quod hoc
quod dicitur de cognitione matutina et vespertina in angelis, introduction est ab Augustino.
.... Sicut autem in die consueto mane est principium diei, vespere autem terminus;
ita cognitio ipsius primordialis esse rerum dicitur cognitio matutina; et haec est secun-
dum quod res sunt in Verbo. Cognitio autem ipsius esse rei creatae secundum quod
in propria natura consistit, dicitur cognitio vespertina. Nam esse rerum fluit a Verbo
si cut a quodam primordial! principio; et hie effluxus terminatur ad esse rerum quod in
propria natura habet."

'Augustine De Civitate Dei Lib. XI, cap. vii (ed. cit., Vol. Ill, p. 14): "Quoniam
scientia creaturae in comparatione scientiae Creatoris quodammodo vesperascit: itemque
lucescit et mane fit, cum et ipsa refertur ad laudem dilectionemque Creatoris; nee in

noctem vergitur, ubi non Creator creaturae dilectione relinquitur Cognitio

quippe creaturae in se ipsa decoloratior est, ut ita dicam, quam cum in Dei Sapientia
cognoscitur, velut in arte qua facta est. Ideo vespera congruentius quam nox did
potest: quae tarn en, ut dixi, cum ad laudandum et amandum refertur Creatorem,

recurrit in mane "

570

"THE EVENING AND THE MORNING WERE ONE DAY" 115

in themselves, rejoicing in their beauty, and refusing to acknowledge
that beauty from God. They preferred their "evening" knowledge
to their "morning" knowledge, and aspired to obtain by themselves
that perfection which the majority gained by conversion to their
"morning" knowledge. Then it happened that the "evening"
knowledge of the rebellious angels became darkened, and turned
to "night."1 But the holy angels who obeyed the summons to
convert their gaze did not on that account lose their "evening"
knowledge, for they have both "morning" and "evening" knowl-
edge combined in their "day" knowledge, as they contemplate the
light of the Divine Wisdom, that light of which they are themselves
an emanation.2 In other words, they understand the creation as it
is in the Divine Wisdom, and they understand it also as it is in itself,
without averting their gaze from the light of the Word.

All this is signified by the Scriptures, for when God said, "Let
there be light," then the light (that is the angels) became perfected.
"And God saw the light" (that is the spiritual creature) "that it
was good: and God divided the light from the darkness" (that is
the good from the bad angels). "And God called the light Day,
and the darkness he called Night."

And the evening and the morning were one day.3

Here we depart from the English version to follow the Latin Vulgate.
Why does the Scripture say that the evening and the morning were

1 Aquinas Summa Theologica, I, Qu. LXIII, Art. VI: " Ad quartum dicendum

Sic igitur instans primum in angelis intelligitur respondere operation! mentis angelicae.
quae se in seipsam convertit per vespertinam cognitionem ; quia in prime die com-
memoratur vespere, sed non mane. Et haec quidem operatic in omnibus bona fuit.
Sed ab hac operatione quidam per matutinam cognitionem ad laudem Verbi sunt con-
versi. Quidam vero in seipsis remanentes, facti sunt nox per super biam intumescentes,
ut Augustinus dicit (Sup. Gen. ad litt. Lib. IV, cap. xxiv). Et sic prima operatic fuit
omnibus communis: sed in secunda sunt distinct!. Et illo in primo instant! omnes
fuerunt boni, sed in secundo fuerunt boni a malis distinct!."

2 Augustine De Genesi ad litteram Lib. IV, cap. xxix (ed cit.t Vol. V, p. 291) : " Quam-
obrem potest aliquis fortasse mecum disputando certare, ut dicat sublimium coelorum
Angelos non alternatim contueri, primo rationes creaturarum incommutabiliter in
Verbi Dei incommutabili veritate, ac deinde ipsas creaturas, et tertio earum etiam in se
ipsis cognitionem ad laudem referre Creatoris, sed eorum mentem mirabili facilitate
haec omnia simul posse. Numquid tamen dicet, aut si quisquam dixerit audiendus est,
illam coelestem in Angelorum millibus civitatem, aut non contemplari Creatoris aeterni-
tatem, aut mutabilitatem ignorare creaturae, aut ex ejus quoque inferiore quadam
cognitione Jlaudare Creatorem? Simul hoc totum possint, simul hoc totum faciant:
possunt tamen et faciunt. Simul ergo habent et diem, et vesperam, et mane."

» . . . . factumque est vespere et mane, dies unus.

571

116 J. E. SHAW

"one day," whereas with regard to the other days of the creation it
uses ordinal numbers, even in the Vulgate, saying: "factum est
vespere et mane, dies secundus .... dies tertius, etc." ? It is to
signify the unity of the angelic nature which was the first day, that
is, when the good angels are converted from their evening to their
morning, they are perfected, just as the day by which they are
signified is complete. As St. Isidore says:

Dies prior factus angeli sunt, quorum propter unitatem insinuandam
non dies primus, sed dies dictus est unus. Qui dies, hoc est natura ange-
lorum, quando creaturam ipsam contemplabantur, quodammodo ves-
perascebat; non autem permanendo in ejus creaturae contuitu, sed laudem
<ejus ad Deum referens, eamque melius in divina ratione conspiciens, con-
tinuo mane fiebat. Si vero permaneret, neglecto Creatore, in creaturae

aspectu jam non vespera, sed nox utique fieret Quia dum suam in

;se cognitionem sibi satisfacere non agnosceret, ut se plenius nosse potuisset,
ad Deum esse referebat creatura, in quo dies se agnoscendo melius fieret.1

And St. Augustine says:

Nimirum ergo si ad istorum dierum opera Dei pertinent Angeli, ipsi
.sunt lux ilia, quae diei nomen accepit, cujus unitas ut commendaretur, non

est dictus dies primus, sed dies unus Cum enim dixit Deus: "Fiat

lux," "et facta est lux"; si recte in hac luce creatio intelligitur Angelorum,
profecto facti sunt participes lucis aeternae, quod est ipsa incommutabilis
Sapientia Dei.2

The day which is thus completed by the conversion of the angels
from evening to morning knowledge has no night. It is the evening
knowledge of the sinning angels that is darkened into night. This
day is evening completed by morning, and both at the same time,
since, as we have seen,3 the good angels do not lose their evening
knowledge (that is the knowledge of things as they are in them-
selves) when they are converted to morning knowledge.4 In con-

1 Sententiarum Lib. I, cap. viii (ed. cit.j Vol. VI, No. 130).

2 De Civitate Dei Lib. XI, cap. ix (ed. cit., Vol. Ill, pp. 17-18).

3 Cf. above p. 115, n. 2, "Simul ergo habent et diem, et vesperam, et mane."

« De Civitate Dei Lib. XI, cap. viii (ed. cit., Vol. Ill, p. 14): "Denique Scriptura
cum illos dies dinumeraret ex ordine, nusquam interposuit vocabulum noctis, non enim
ait alicubi: 'Facta est nox': sed, 'Facta est vespera, et factum est mane dies unus.' "

Summa Theologica, I, Qu. LVIII, Art. VI: "Et ideo post vesperam non ponitur
nox, sed mane; ita quod mane sit finis praecedentis diei, et principium sequentis,
inquantum angeli cognitionem praecedentis operis ad laudem Dei referunt. Ibid.,
Art. VII: Ad secundum dicendum, quod duae operationes possunt simul esse unius
potentiae, quarum una ad aliam refertur; .... Cognitio autem vespertina in angelis

refertur ad matutinam, ut Augustinus dicit Unde nihil prohibet utramque

simul esse in angelis."

572

"THE EVENING AND THE MORNING WERE ONE DAY" 117

verting the good angels to morning knowledge God does not deprive
them of evening knowledge.

The above-mentioned considerations may have some bearing on
the frequently discussed lines of Dante (Paradiso, XXVII, 136-38) :
Cosi si fa la pelle bianca nera,
Nel primo aspetto della bella figlia
Di quei che apporta mane e lascia sera.

I am inclined to think that "Quei che apporta mane e lascia
sera ' ' is not the sun, as is usually supposed, but God himself. Doubt-
less a reference to the sun is implied. In Convivio, III, 12, Dante
says that no material creature is more worthy than the sun to be
used as a symbol for God, and he continues with a comparison, in
which, by the way, the relation of the deity to the good and bad
angels has its place. But in this passage of the Paradiso it seems
to me that the sun is only referred to in order to distinguish God
from it, for the sun cannot bring the morning without having first
removed the evening by his departure, and brought on the night,
whereas God brings to the angels an everlasting morning without
depriving them of the evening, as we have seen. In fact this same
distinguishing comparison is made by St. Augustine in the thirtieth
chapter of the De Genesi, Book IV, the twenty-ninth being a single
paragraph entitled: "In angelica cognitione dies, vespera et mane,"
which ends with the words already familiar to us: "Simul ergo
habent diem, et vesperam, et mane." Then St. Augustine continues:

Neque enim verendum est, ne forte qui est idoneus jam ilia sentire,
ideo non putet hoc ibi posse fieri, quia in his diebus, qui solis hujus circuitu
peraguntur, fieri non potest. Et hoc quidem non potest eisdem partibus
terrae: universum autem mundum quis non videt, si attendere velit, et
diem ubi sol est, et noctem ubi non est, et vesperam unde discedit, et
mane quo accedit, simul habere ? Sed nos plane in terris haec omnia simul
habere non possumus: nee ideo tamen istam terrenam conditionem lucisque
corporeae temporalem localemque circuitum illi patriae spiritali coaequare
debemus, ubi semper est dies in contemplatione incommutabilis veritatis,
semper vespera in cognitione in se ipsa creaturae, semper mane etiam ex
hac cognitione in laude Creatoris. Quia non ibi abscessu lucis superioris,
sed inferioris cognitionis distinctione fit vespera; nee mane tanquam nocti
ignorantiae scientia matutina succedat, sed quod vespertinam etiam cogni-
tionem in gloriam Conditoris attollat. Denique et ille nocte non nominata,

573

118 J. E. SHAW

"Vespere, inquit, et mane et meridie enarrabo et annuntiabo; et exaudies
vocem meam:" hie fortasse per temporum vices, sed tamen quantum puto
significans quid sine temporum vicibus ageretur in patria, cui ejus pere-
grinatio suspirabat.

It is not in heaven as on earth: in heaven the evening does not
come only when the light is departing, and the morning does not
follow the night, but comes to brighten the evening ("Quia non ibi
abscessu," etc.) : God brings the morning to be with the evening, a
thing the sun cannot do.

And so it appears to me that "Quei che apporta mane e lascia
sera" means in modern Italian: "Quegli che arreca la mattina e
non toglie la sera."1 He is indeed a "sun," but a greater sun than
that which rises and sets for the earth. He is the sun of the angels,
as Beatrice calls him when she and Dante are in the sphere of the
lesser sun.2

If we adopt the hypothesis that "Quei che apporta mane e
lascia sera" is God, who then is "la bella figlia," the daughter of
God, in the first aspect of whom the skin changes from white to
black? It will be remembered that in the Convivio Dante calls
Philosophy "figlia d'Iddio, regina di tutto";3 "la bellissima e
onestissima figlia dello Imperadore dell' universe;4 "sposa del-
Plmperadore del Cielo . . . . e non solamente sposa, ma suora e
figlia dilettissima."5 He defines philosophy as "uno amoroso uso di
Sapienza"6 because, as he explains, wisdom is its subject and love
is its form.7 It may be human, angelic, or divine according to the
different capabilities of men, angels, and God, but it is "massima-
mente in Dio, perocche in Lui e somma Sapienza e sommo Amore e
sommo Atto, che non puo essere altrove se non in quanto da Esso
precede."8 Dante's "Filosofia," then, although properly thus
named by Pythagoras with special regard to human philosophy,9 is

1 The opposite of apportare is torre, as in Convivio (ed. Moore), IV, 12, 11. 39-42:
"Promettono le false traditrici, se ben si guarda, di torre ogni sete e ogni mancanza, e
apportar saziamento e bastanza."

2 Paradiso, X, 51-53: " Ringrazia il Sol degli Angeli, ch'a questo Sensibil t'ha levato
per sua grazia."

3 Convivio, II, 13, 11. 71-72.

4 Ibid., II, 16, 11. 101-3. 7 ibid., Ill, 14, 11. 7-9.

* Ibid., Ill, 12, 11. 115-18. s n>id.t in, 12, 11. 95-99.

« Ibid., Ill, 12, 11. 94-95. » Ibid., Ill, 11, 11. 22-53.

574

"THE EVENING AND THE MORNING WERE ONE DAY" 119

no other than the loving wisdom of God which is called by St. Augus-
tine: "aeterna ilia et incommutabilis, quae non est facta, sed genita
Sapientia,"1 and "ipsa Dei Sapientia, quae non creata est, sed
nata "2 Love and Wisdom are inseparable in God as else-
where, they are as form and subject, soul and body,8 and both
together are continually represented to us as light. " Essa £ candore
dell' eterna Luce," says Dante quoting the Book of Wisdom,4
"quella luce virtuosissima, Filosofia,"6 and St. Augustine: "nata
de Deo lux, est ipsa Dei Sapientia."6 According to this hypothesis,
therefore, "la bella figlia," in the lines we are discussing, is that
light of eternal wisdom which was in God before the heavens were
created and the angels were formed of light.

Cum enim dixit Deus: "Fiat lux, et facta est lux"; si recte in hac luce
creatio intelligitur Angelorum, profecto facti sunt participes lucis aeternae,
quod est ipsa incommutabilis Sapientia Dei, per quam facta sunt omnia,
quern dicimus unigenitum Dei Filium; ut ea luce illuminati, qua cfeati:
fierent lux et vocarentur dies participatione incommutabilis lucis et diei,
quod est Verbum Dei, per quod et ipsi et omnia facti sunt. "Lumen quippe
verum quod illuminat omnem hominem in hunc mundum venientem," hoc
illuminat et omnem Angelum mundum, ut sit lux non in se ipso, sed in Deo:
a quo si avertitur Angelus, fit immundus; . . . .7

These words of St. Augustine remind us that the angels are
themselves the light that was created by the eternal light of the
wisdom of God when the Word was uttered: "Let there be light."8
And since the angels are the first creatures of God, it might reason-
ably be said that they are the "first aspect" of that light, the "primo
aspetto della bella figlia." Indeed the distinction between that

1 De Civitate Dei Lib. I, cap. xvii (ed. cit.. Vol. Ill, p. 180).

2 De Genesi ad litteram, imperfect™ lib., cap. V (ed. cit., Vol. V, p. 124).
« Conv., Ill, 14, 11. 6-10 and 15, 11. 119-20.

< Ibid., Ill, 15, 1. 54.

» Ibid., IV, 1, 1. 95.

8 De Genesi ad litteram, imperfectus lib., loc. cit.

i De Civitate Dei Lib. XI, cap. ix (ed. cit.. Vol. Ill, pp. 17-18).

s St. Augustine insists that the word "light" is not used metaphorically for the
angels, although in a sense different from the usual. De Genesi ad litteram Lib. IV,
cap. xxviii (ed. cit.. Vol. V, p. 289). St. Thomas modifies this statement with a subtle
distinction: "Si ergo accipiatur nomen luminis secundum suam primam impositionem,

metaphorice in spiritualibus dicitur si autem accipiatur secundum quod est in

usu loquentium ad omnem manifestationem extensum, sic proprie in spiritualibus
dicitur" (Summa Theologica, I, Qu. LXVII, Art. I).

575

120 J. E. SHAW

first light which is the angels,1 before which there was no light in
the universe, and that eternal light of Wisdom which created it,
is not easy to make, all the more since the angels are also called
"Sapientia"; nevertheless it is a distinction which it is necessary to
make, according to St. Augustine:

Si autem spiritalis lux facta est, cum dixit Deus, "Fiat lux"; non ilia
vera Patri coaeterna intelligenda est, per quam facta sunt omnia, et quae
illuminat omnem hominem; sed ilia de qua dici potuit, "Prior omnium
creata est Sapientia." Cum enim aeterna ilia et incommutabilis, quae non
est facta, sed genita Sapientia, in spiritales atque rationales creaturas,
sicut in animas sanctas se transfert, ut illuminatae lucere possint, fit in eis
quaedam luculentae rationis affectio, quae potest accipi facta lux, cum
diceretDeus: "Fiat lux"; . . . .2

The word "aspetto" is used very frequently by Dante, always
in one of two senses : it may mean the view which anyone may have
of anything,3 or it may mean the appearance of anyone or anything.4
The word "primo" may also be used in one of two senses: it may
mean first in the order of origin, or natural order (e.g., as the crea-
tion of the unformed heaven and earth preceded that of the formed,
before time was) ;5 or it may mean first in the order of succession
or duration, that is first in order of time.

Accordingly, the expression "primo aspetto," as applied to the
light of the Divine Wisdom, may have the following meanings:
"Primo aspetto" a, 1: The primary, i.e., the most direct, view of
the light of the wisdom of God — that which the angels have, a, 2:
The primary appearance of the light of the wisdom of God — that
which is the angels. 6, 1: The earliest view6 of the light of the

i "Lux ilia prima," De Civitate Dei Lib. XI, cap. xix (ed. cit., Vol. Ill, p. 32).

* De Genesi ad litteram Lib. I, cap. xvii (ed. cit., Vol. V, p. 180) ; also Lib. I, cap. viii
(ed. cit., Vol. V, p. 202) : " Conditio vero coeli prius erat in Verbo Dei secundum genitam
Sapientiam; deinde facta est in creatura spiritali, hoc est, in cognitione Angelorum
secundum creatam in illis sapientiam," and again in De Genesi imperfectus liber, cap. v
(ed. cit., Vol. V, p. 124): "Alia est lux de Deo nata, et alia lux quam fecit Deus: nata
de Deo lux, est ipsa Dei Sapientia; facta vero lux, est quaelibet mutabilis, sive corporea
sive incorporea."

« Convivio, III, 13, 11. 15-17: "Per che si vede che le infernali Intelligenze dello
aspetto di questa bellissima sono private."

*Ibid., 15, 11. 6-10: "Cose appariscon nello suo aspetto Dice adunque lo

testo, che nella faccia di costei appaiono cose che "

* Summa Theologica, I, Qu. LXVI, Art. IV.

* Any expression in terms of time, regarding the knowledge of the angels, must be
taken metaphorically, since the angels are previous to time in the natural order. Summa
Theologica, loc. cit.

576

"THE EVENING AND THE MORNING WERE ONE DAY" 121

wisdom of God— that which the angels have. 6, 2: The earliest
appearance of the light of the wisdom of God— that which is the
angels.1

The two meanings of "aspetto" (view and appearance) are not
always distinguishable from one another. They tend to be fused
in one just as do the active and passive elements in perception
and understanding. St. Thomas speaking of the understanding of
angels says: "In his qui sunt sine materia, idem est intellectus et
quod intelligitur; ac si diceretur, quod intellectus in actu est intellec-
tum in actu."2 The two meanings of " primo " (primary and earliest)
are also not necessarily distinguished, and the word is often used
without any such distinction, as e.g., when the angels are referred
to as the first creatures. And so the expression "primo aspetto"
may properly be used at the same time in all of the four senses that
have been defined. I believe that Dante is using it in this com-
posite general sense in the passage we are considering.

The light of the Divine Wisdom floods the Empyrean, and
streams directly upon the angels who are informed by it and reflect
it like mirrors — "specchi," the word used by Dante.3 They are
thus the first reflection of the light of God's wisdom, and at the
same time they participate in that light so intimately that they
are properly called by the same names "sapientia" and "lux."
They are, in fact, the very wisdom of God in its created aspect,
which is referred to in the words quoted4 by Dante: "Ond' £ scritto
di Lei: 'Dal principio dinanzi dalli secoli creata sono'"; and in this
sense Wisdom herself may be called a mirror: "Essa e candore
delF eterna Luce; specchio senza macola della maesta di Dio."8
St. Isidore sums the matter up as follows :

Ante omnem creaturam angeli facti sunt, dum dictum est Fiat lux; de
ipsis enim dicit Scriptural Prior omnium creata est sapientia. Lux enim

» Speaking absolutely, the primo aspetto of the Divine Wisdom, both in the sense of
primary and (metaphorically) earliest, view and appearance, is the view which God has
of his own wisdom and the appearance of that wisdom in himself upon which he looks.
But, in the passage we are considering, Beatrice is speaking as a creature to a fellow-
creature, and it is obvious that the Divine Wisdom, as considered hi relation to God
alone, can undergo no blackening process. Convivio, III, 13, 11. 1-6.

2 Summa Theologica, I, Qu. LV, Art. I.

*.Paradiso, IX, 61, et alibi.

* Convivio, III, 14, 11. 58-59.

' Ibid., III. 15, 11. 54-55.

577

122 M. E. SHA.W

dicuntur participando luci aeternae. Sapientia enim dicuntur ingenitae
inhaerendo Sapientiae.1

That light which the angels reflect, and with which they are
informed, is also transmitted by them to their inferiors in the angelic
hierarchy and to men on earth, "subobscure," as the Pseudo-Diony-
sius says, since the light, in transmission, loses in clarity.2 This
double function of theirs (the reflection and transmission of the
light) corresponds to their morning and evening knowledge, which,
as we have seen, they have simultaneously in one and the first day.3
By means of this transmission men enjoy the "secondo aspetto," a
secondary inferior view of the light of Divine Wisdom. "Onde
nelle Intelligenze raggia la divina luce senza mezzo, nell'altre si
ripercuote da queste Intelligenze prima illuminate,"4 says Dante,
and again: "discendo a mostrare come nella umana intelligenza
essa secondariamente ancora venga";5 so in the lines,

Fin che il piacere eterno, che diretto
Raggiava in Beatrice, dal bel viso
Mi contentava col secondo aspetto,6

the poet means that he enjoyed the secondary view which is the
privilege of mortals on earth. Just as in the angels is the "primo
aspetto," so in men on earth is the "secondo aspetto."

But if the angelic nature may properly be said both to have and
to be the "first aspect" of the light of Divine Wisdom, that name is
applicable in an altogether peculiar manner to the angel who was
created first of all the angels, pre-eminent over all in knowledge and

* Sententiarum Lib. I, cap. x (ed. ciL, Vol. VI, No. 135) ; cf . also P. Lombard! Sen-
tentiarum Lib. II, dist. II. Op. omn. (ed. Migne, Paris, 1880, Tom. II, col. 1): "Unde
illud, Eccl. I: • Primo omnium creata est sapientia,' quod intelligitur de angelica natura
quae in Scriptura saepe vita, sapientia et lux dicitur. Nam sapientia ilia quae Deus
est, creata non est."

*S. Dionysii Areopag. Op. omn. (ed. Migne, Vol. I, De Coel. Hierarchies, p. 239).

* De Genesi ad litteram Lib. II, cap. viii (ed. cit., Vol. V, p. 202): "Neque enim
sicut nos ad percipiendam sapientiam proflciebant Angeli, ut invisibilia Dei per ea
quae facta sunt intellecta conspicerent, qui ex quo creati sunt, ipsi Verbi aeternitate
sancta et pia contemplatione perfruuntur; atque inde despicientes, secundum id quod
intus vident, vel recte facta approbant, vel peccata improbant."

* Convivio, HI, 14, 11. 35-37.
5 Ibid., Ill, 13, 11. 22-24.

* Paradiso, XVIII, 16-18.

578

"THE EVENING AND THE MORNING WERE ONE DAY" 123

beauty. This angel is Lucifer, named from the light itself.1 Of
him says Isidore:

Ante omnem creationem mundi creati sunt angeli, et ante omnem
creationem angelorum diabolus conditus est, sicut scriptum est: Ipse est
principium viarum Dei, etc.2

And St. Gregory:

Prima et nobilior creatura fuit angelus qui cecidit .... quia nimirum
cum cuncta creans ageret, hunc primum condidit, quern reliquis angelis
eminentiorem fecit. Hujus primatus eminentiam conspicit propheta cum
dicit : Cedri non fuerunt altiores illo in paradiso Dei; abietes non adaequaverunt
summitatem ejus; platani non fuerunt aequae frondibus illius; omne lignum
paradisi Dei non est assimilatum illi et pulchritudini ejus, quoniam speciosum
fecit eum in multis condensisque frondibus (Ezech. 31:8-9). Qui namque
accipi in cedris, abietibus et platanis possunt, nisi ilia virtutum coelestium
procerae celsitudinis agmina in aeternae laetitiae viriditate plantata?
Quae quamvis excelsa sint condita, huic tamen nee praelata sunt nee aequata.
Qui speciosus factus in multis condensisque frondibus esse dicitur, quia
praelatum caeteris legionibus, tanta ilium species pulchriorem reddidit,
quanta et supposita angelorum multitudo decoravit. Ista arbor in para-
diso Dei tot quasi condensas frondes habuit, quot sibi suppositas super-
norum spirituum legiones attendit. Qui idcirco peccans sine venia damnatus
est, quia magnus sine comparatione fuerat creatus. Hinc ei rursum per
eundem prophetam dicitur: Tu signaculum similitudinis Dei, plenus sapientia
et perfectus decore, in delidis paradisi Dei fuisti (Ezech. 28:12, 13). Multa
enim de ejus magnitudine locuturus, primo verbo cuncta complexus est.
Quid namque boni non habuit, si signaculum Dei similitudinis fuit ? . . . .

And he continues expounding another passage of Ezechiel in the
same sense.3

Gregory is corroborated as follows by Petrus Lombardus:

Etin Ezechiele legitur, c. 28: Tu signaculum similitudinis Quod

Gregorius exponens ait, in illo imago Dei similis insinuatur impressa. Item
in Ezechiele legitur, c. 25: Omnis lapis pretiosus operimentum ejus, id est,

» Purgatorio, XII, 25-26: ". . . . colui che fu nobil create Piu ch'altra creatura.
. . . ." Inferno, XXXIV, 18: "la creatura ch'ebbe 11 bel sembiante."

2 Sententiarum Lib. I, cap. x (ed. cit., Tom. VI, No. 135).

» S. Gregorii Papae cogn. Magni Moralium, Lib. IV, cap. xxiii. Op. omn. (ed.
Migne, Tom. I, nn. 1071-73); also Homiliarum Lib. II, homilia xxxiv (ed. cit., Tom. II,
n. 1604): "Omnis lapis pretiosus operimentum tuum: sardius, topazius, et jaspis, chry-
solythus, onyx, et beryllus, sapphirus, carbunculus, et smaragdus (Ezech. 25:13). Ecce
novem dixit nomina lapidum, quia profecto novem sunt ordines angelorum. Quibus
nimirum ordinibus ille primus angelus ideo ornatus et opertus exstitit, quia dum cunctis
agminibus angelorum praelatus est, ex eorum comparatione clarior fuit."

579

124 ' J. E. SHAW

omnis angelus quasi operimentum ejus erat, quia, ut dicit Gregorius, horn. 34
super Isai: In aliorum comparatione caeteris clarior fuit, unde vocatus est
Lucifer, sicut testatur Isaias, c. 14: Quomodo, inquit, cecidisti, Lucifer,
qui mane oriebaris 71

. . . .Lucifer qui fuit de collegio superiorum [angelorum] ipsis etiam
dignior exstitit, qui aliis excellentiores creati fuerant.2

And also by St. Thomas:

Et ideo Gregorius dicit, quod ille qui peccavit fuit superior inter omnes.
Et hoc videtur probabilius; quia peccatum angeli non processit ex aliqua
pronitate, sed ex solo libero arbitrio. Unde magis videtur consideranda
esse ratio quae sumitur a motive ad peccandum.3

. When God said, "Let there be light," there sprang into being
myriads of beautiful forms of light varying in brightness, who almost
immediately converted their gaze from themselves and the worlds
below them, to the source of the light, and so became at once brighter
than before. But the most dazzling of all, the very counterpart of
the Wisdom of God, remained averted, unwilling to admit that so
brilliant a creature as himself could have been created by another.
And so did others of the glorious creatures following the evil example.
And at once their brightness began to fade, and they became dark.
Their evening knowledge, which they preferred, could not survive
without being wedded to the morning knowledge and perpetuated
in day knowledge: it darkened into night: "et vocavit Deus lucem
diem, et tenebras vocavit noctem."

If, then, the expression "primo aspetto" connotes the angelic
nature as first created, it specifically denotes the first angel, "first"
in both the chief meanings of the word, in whom the angelic nature
degenerated, in whom the white skin of the beautiful daughter of
him who brings morning to the angels without removing evening
became blackened.

The sin that is denounced by Beatrice in our passage which
begins: "O cupidigia, che i mortali affonde" is covetousness, that
general sin which includes all others, which is the common disease
of the whole world, which is the same as St. Augustine's "amor

» P. Lombard! Sententiarum Lib. II, dist. vi. Op. omn. (ed. Migne, Tom. II, col.
662).

* Ibid., dist. ix. Op. omn. (ed. Migne, Tom. II, col. 671).
8 Summa Theologica, I, Qu. LXIII, Art. VII.

580

"THE EVENING AND THE MORNING WERE ONE DAY" 125

privatus," love of self. This is the sin that caused Lucifer to fall;
the sin that, in his case, is often called pride:

Merito initium omnis peccatum Scriptura definivit, dicens: "Initium
omnis peccati superbia." Cui testimonio non inconvenienter aptatur
etiam illud, quod Apostolus ait: "Radix omnium malorum est avaritia":
si avaritiam generalem intelligamus, qua quisque appetit aliquid amplius
quam oportet, propter excellentiam suam, et quendam rei amorem: cui
sapienter nomen latina lingua indidit, cum appellavit privatum, quod potius
a detrimento quam ab incremento dictum elucet. Omnis enim privatio
minuit. Unde itaque vult eminere superbia inde in angustias egestatemque
contruditur, cum ex communi ad proprium damnoso sui amore redigitur.
Specialis est autem avaritia, quae usitatius appellatur amor pecuniae.
Cujus nomine Apostolus per speciem genus significans, universalem avaritiam
volebat intelligi dicendo: "Radix omnium malorum est avaritia." Hac
enim et diabolus cecidit, qui utique non amavit pecuniam, sed propriam
potestatem. Proinde per versus sui amor privat sancta societate turgidum
spiritum, eumque coarctat miseria jam per iniquitatem satiari cupientem.1

.... inordinatus amor sui est causa omnis peccati. In amore autem
sui includitur inordinatus appetitus boni; unusquisque enim appetit bonum
ei quern amat. Unde manifestum est quod inordinatus appetitus boni est
causa omnis peccati.2

.... secundum quod cupiditas importat universaliter appetitum cujus-
libet boni, sic etiam superbia vitae continetur sub cupiditate.3

It must not be forgotten that the wisdom of God is with love.
Dante, as we have seen, defines Philosophy as "uno amoroso uso
della Sapienza; il quale massimamente 6 in Dio, . . . ."4 and
St. Thomas says:

Filius autem est Verbum, non qualecumque, sed spirans amorem. Unde
Augustinius dicit (De Trin. Lib. IX, cap. x) "Verbum autem quod insinuare
intendimus, cum amore notitia est." Non igitur secundum quamlibet per-
fectionem intellectus mittitur Filius, sed secundum talem instructionem
intellectus, qua prorumpat in affectum amoris; . . . .5

and accordingly Dante, describing the creation of the angels, unites
the light of God's wisdom with his love:

Non per avere a s£ di bene acquisto,

Ch' esser non pud, ma perche suo splendore

Potesse, risplendendo, dir: Sussisto;

S'aperse in nuovi amor Peterno amore.6

1 De Genesi ad litteram Lib. XI, cap. xv (ed. cit., Vol. V, p. 530).

2 Summa Theologica, Prima Secundae, Qu. LXXVII, Art. V (ed. cit.. Vol. Ill, p. 267).

3 Ibid., loc. cit. 5 Summa Theologica, I, Qu. XLIII, Art. V.
* Convivio, III, 12, 11. 94-96. • Paradiso, XXIX, 13-18.

581

126 , J. E. SHAW

In Lucifer both knowledge and love became perverted, and
Lucifer is the head of the universal body of the wicked, which
includes them all — fallen angels and degenerate men — just as Christ
is the head of the universal body of the good — angels and men.
On this consideration St. Augustine lays the foundations of his two
"civitates," "civitas Dei" and "civitas diaboli":

Hi duo amores, quorum alter sanctus est, alter immundus; alter socialis,
alter privatus; .... praecesserunt in Angelis, alter in bonis, alter in malis;
et distinxerunt conditas in genere humano civitates duas, sub admirabili et
ineffabili providentia Dei, cuncta quae creata sunt administrantis et ordi-
nantis, alteram justorum, alteram iniquorum.1

The word "pelle" used by Dante in our passage suggests a
body, and the analogy between the body of the devil and the body
of God is widespread in the teachings of the early Fathers, and
involves accurate distinctions, in interpreting the Scriptures, between
passages which are to be understood as speaking of the head, and
others which speak only of the body, while others still speak of
both together.

In the De Doctrina Christiana, a work quoted by Dante himself
in the De Monarchia, St. Augustine devotes eight chapters to a
summary of the Liber Regularum of Tichonius, his contemporary, a
book containing directions for interpreting the Scriptures, which
the bishop of Hippo valued highly. The first rule is one for inter-
preting references to the body of God, which St. Augustine reports
as follows :

Prima de Domino et ejus corpore est, in qua scientes aliquando capitis
et corporis, id est, Christi et Ecclesiae unam personam nobis intimari ....
non haesitiemus quando a capite ad corpus, vel a corpore transitur ad caput,
et tamen non receditur ab una eademque persona. Una enim persona
loquitur dicens: "Sicut sponso imposuit mihi mitram, et sicut sponsam
ornavit me ornamento" (Isa. 61:10); et tamen quid horum duorum capiti,
quid corpori, id est quid Christo, quid Ecclesiae conveniat, utique intelli-
gendum est.2

From this explanation it appears that both head and body may
be spoken of in the same passage, both the unity of the two and the
distinction between the two being understood.

» De Genesi ad litteram Lib. XI, cap. xv (ed. ciL, Vol. V, p. 531).

» De Doctrina Christiana Lib. Ill, cap. xxxi (ed. cit.. Vol. V, pp. 37-38).

582

"THE EVENING AND THE MORNING WERE ONE DAY" 127

The second rule is regarding references to the mixed body of
God, inasmuch as the church is composed of both faithful and
hypocrites, both good and bad. The example taken from Tichonius
is from the Song of Solomon (Cant. I, 5): "Fusca sum et speciosa
ut tabernacula Cedar, ut pelles Salomonis," in which it is necessary
to explain how the church can be both "black" and "comely."1

It is not likely that the words "pelles Salomonis "— " curtains
of Solomon," suggested to Dante his "pelle" in our passage,2 for
another of the rules of Tichonius, the seventh, is concerned with
references to the body of the devil :

Septima Tichonii regula est, eademque postrema, de diabolo et ejus cor-
pore. Est enim et ipse caput impiorum, qui sunt ejus quodam modo corpus,
ituri cum illo in supplicmm ignis aeterni: sicut Christus caput est Ecclesiae,
quod est corpus ejus, futurum cum illo in regno et gloria sempiterna. Sicut
ergo in prima regula, quam vocat de Domino et ejus corpore, vigilandum est
ut intelligatur, cum de una eademque persona Scriptura loquitur, quid
conveniat capiti, quid corpori; sic et in ista novissima, aliquando in dia-
bolum dicitur, quod non in ipso, sed potius in ejus corpore possit agnosci,
quod habet non solum in eis, qui manifestissime foris sunt, sed in eis etiam,
qui, cum ad ipsum pertineant, tamen ad tempus miscentur Ecclesiae, . . . .3

The body of the devil is recognized and explained as a symbol
for the whole sum of the wicked by others beside St. Augustine
following Tichonius, for example St. Gregory:

In Evangelio Veritas dicit: Ego sum lux mundi (Joan., VIII, 12). sicut
autem isdem Redemptor noster una persona est cum congregatione bonorum;
ipse namque caput est corporis, et nos hujus capitis corpus; ita autiquus
hostis una persona est cum cuncta collectione reproborum, quia ipse eis ad
iniquitatem quasi caput praeeminet, illi autem dum ad persuasa deserviunt,
velut subjunctum capiti corpus inhaerent. Quod ergo de hac nocte, id
est antique hoste dicitur, dignum est ut ad corpus ejus, id est ad iniquos
quosque derivetur.4

i Ibid., cap. xxxii (ed. cit., p. 38).

* A better suggestion is in Gregory's comment on Job XL: 26: " Nunquid implebit
sagenas pelle ejus, aut gurgustium piscium capite illiua." Subaudis, ut ego, qui intra
Ecclesiam fldelium prius quasi pellem diaboli extremes atque inflmos colligo, et post
modum caput illius, id est prudentes mini adversaries, subdo. M orolium, Lib. XXXIII,
cap. xviii (ed. cit., Tom II, No. 1098).

» Ibid., cap. xxxvii, ed. cit., pp. 48-49.

« Moralium, Lib. IV, cap. xi (ed. cit., Tom. I, No. 112). St. Isidore also gives a
summary of the rules of Tichonius, and uses the passages examined by the latter, among
which is that from Isaiah (14:12): "Quomodo cecidisti de coelo, Lucifer, qui mane
oriebaris?" Sententiarum Lib. I, cap. xix. It is not insignificant, I think, that, in the

583

128 J. E. SHAW

If, as I believe, the expression "primo aspetto" refers specifically
to Lucifer, Dante is, I think, referring to him as the head of the
whole body of the wicked, and at the same time to that whole
body; just as, according to Tichonius and St. Augustine, a single
sentence of the Scriptures may refer both to Christ the head of
the church and to the whole assemblage of the elect, which is
the body of Christ. Beatrice is denouncing the ravages of sin
("cupidigia") in the whole world; and just as it is impossible for
her to neglect the very source of "cupidigia," the first example of
it in the world, so it is impossible for her (especially now that she
and Dante are in the Primum Mobile, where are none but angels)
to neglect the angels and speak only of men. Men and angels are
inseparable in their sin; as there are only two states of the rational
creatures of God, so there is only one hierarchy:

.... demonstretur quantum a nobis potest, quam non inconveniens
neque incongrua dicatur esse hominibus Angelisque societas: ut non quatuor,
duae scilicet Angelorum totidemque hominum, sed duae potius civitates,
hoc est societates, merito esse dicantur; una in bonis, altera in malis, non
solum Angelis, verumctiam hominibus constitutae.1

Quia igitur unus est Deus princeps non solum omnium angelorum, sed
etiam hominum et totius creaturae; ideo non solum omnium angelorum, sed
etiam totius rationalis creaturae, quae sacrorum particeps esse potest, una
est hierarchia, secundum quod Augustinus dicit (De Civitate Dei Lib. XII,
cap. i, circ. princ.) "duas esse civitates, hoc est societates, unam in angelis
bonis, et hominibus, alteram in malis."2

If Dante had intended to refer only to the fall of Lucifer, we
might expect him to have used a past tense, "cosi si fe' la pelle
bianca nera," for example; but since he intends to include in his
reference not only the head but also the whole " societas malorum"

Moralium of St. Gregory, the chapter before the one in which is magnified the pre-
eminence of Lucifer over the other angels, contains the following comment on the passage
from the Lamentations of Jeremiah: "Candidiores Nazarei ejus nive, nitidiores lacte,
rubicundiores ebore antique, sapphire pulchriores; denigrata est super carbones facies

eorum, et non sunt cogniti in Plateis (Thren. IV, 7, 8): Denigrata est super

carbones facies eorum. Nigri enim post candorem fiunt, quia amissa Dei justicia cum
de se praesumant, in ea etiam quae non intelligunt, peccata dilabuntur; et quia post
amoris ignem ad frigus torporis veniunt, entinctis carbonibus ex comparatione prae-
feruntur." Lib. XXXII, cap. xxii. Op. omn. (ed. cit., Tom. II, No. 1070).

* De Civitate Dei Lib. XII, cap. i (ed. cit., Vol. Ill, p. 60).

* Summa Theologica, I, Qu. CVIII, Art. I.

584

"THE EVENING AND THE MORNING WERE ONE DAT" 129

which is the body of the devil, he uses the present tense.1 And if
he had access to the text of Tichonius, which is by no means unlikely
considering the fame of the work, he would find an example exactly
fitted for his purpose, an example taken from Holy Scripture refer-
ring to the fall of Lucifer in the same comprehensive way, and using
the present tense accordingly. For in the seventh rule of Tichonius
"De diabolo et ejus corpore" occurs the following comment on
Isaiah 14:16:

Qui viderint te mirabuntur super te et dicent: Hie est homo qui concitat
terram, commovet reges, qui ponit orbem terrae totum desertum .... non enim
dicent: Hie est homo qui incitavit terram, movit reges et posuit orbem
totum desertum, sed Incitat et Commovet et Ponit. Hominem enim totum
corpus dicit tarn in regibus quam in populis, cuius hominis superbi partem
cum Deus percutit et ad inferos deiicit dicimus: Hie est homo qui incitat
terram, commovet reges, scilicet sanctos.2

The sin of covetousness which was the undoing of Lucifer cor-
rupted the whole hierarchy from top to bottom. From the first
angel to the first man the disease spread rapidly. In heaven the
pestilence was quickly eliminated because there God rules his sub-
jects directly, but on earth where there is no direct ruler (in the
absence of a heavenly appointed emperor) it is still reaping its
harvest.3 For this reason Beatrice, in her speech beginning: "O
cupidigia, che i mortali affonde," is speaking of covetousness
among men, since the angels are now immune, but that she has
not forgotten that men and angels belong to a single hierarchy,
and that she is thinking also of the beginning of the whole disaster,
is confirmed by the illustration she uses of the tree the blossoms of
which fail to produce fruit:

Ben fiorisce negli uomini il volere:
Ma la pioggia continua converte
In bozzacchioni le susine vere.4

i It is probable that "cosi si fa" is the correct reading, since all the oldest MSS
seem to have it.

* Liber Regularum Tychonii (ed. J. A. Robinson, Cambridge University Press,
1895), p. 75.

» Paradiso XXVII, 139-41: "Tu, perch6 non ti facci meraviglia, Pensa che in terra
non e chi govern! ; Onde si svia 1'umana famiglia." St. Thomas in Summa Theologica
I, Qu. CVIII, Art. I, after declaring that properly speaking there is only one hierarchy
of men and angels, continues: "Sed si consideretur principatus ex parte multitudinis
ordinatae sub principe, sic unus principatus dicitur secundum quod multitude uno et

eodem modo potest gubernationem principis recipere Et ideo oportet distingui

humanam hierarchiam ab angelica."

« Paradiso, XXVII, 124-26.

585

130 J. E. SHAW

For in the Convivio Dante uses the same illustration for the cor-
ruption of the bad angels. There he is arguing that God's fore-
knowledge of the fall of some could not deter him from creating the
angels, and he continues:

.... che non sarebbe da lodare la Natura, se sapendo proprio che li
fiori d'uno arbore in certa parte perdere si dovessono, non producesse in
quello fiori, e per li vani abbandonasse la produzione delli fruttiferi.1
So in the Paradiso where, speaking of Lucifer, he says:

il primo superbo,
Che fu la somma d'ogni creatura,
Per non aspettar lume, cadde acerbo.2

The words "cadde acerbo" ("fell unripe") represent the same
metaphor.

1 think that the obscurity of the lines "Cosl si fa," etc., is caused
by the fact that, in the rest of her speech, Beatrice is speaking of
the blighting effect of covetousness on earth. None of the inter-
preters looked here for a reference to covetousness in heaven, and
to some the words "nel primo aspetto" seemed to refer to the early
degeneracy of the individuals on earth, which had just been described
in three consecutive "terzine." Such a reference, however, would
not have been accurate, for although that degeneracy is said to
appear early in the youth of those affected by the blighting influence,
it is nevertheless not sudden; its rapidity is not to be compared
with the suddenness of the fall of the first angel, less than twenty
seconds after his creation:3 the "susine vere" are perverted into
" bozzacchioni " by the steady rain, the "pioggia continua."4 And
yet the blighting influence operates early on the youth of man, and
I think the word "cosi" does refer to this precocity: "thus early,"

» Convivio, III, 12, 11. 76-81.

2 Paradiso, XIX, 46-48.
*Ibid.t XXIX, 49-51.

4 The metaphor of rain is used very frequently by Dante for celestial influence.
The fallen angels inhabit the air, the "aer caliginosus," whence descends the rain. Petri
Lombard! Sententiarum Lib. II, dist. vi, and Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica, I,
Qu. LXIV, Art. IV. The "pioggia continua," then, may mean the temptations of the
devil, but since the rain at first favors vegetation, it may mean instead the continual
instruction in religious matters which is unaccompanied by discipline. How this may
be is explained by Gregory in his comment on Job 38:28: Quis est pluviae pater? etc.,
where occurs the following passage: " Terra enim cum compluitur, jactata in earn semina
feracius ligantur. Sed rursum si illam pluvia immoderatius irrigat, in culmo pinguedinem
frumenti virtutemque mutat" — Moralium, Lib. XXIX, cap. xxx (ed. cit., Tom. II,
No. 945).

586

"THE EVENING AND THE MORNING WERE ONE DAY" 131

says Beatrice, "does the white skin turn black in the body of the
devil," that is, in the society of the wicked, and the use of the desig-
nation "primo aspetto ecc." implies that the degenerate among man-
kind follow the example of the head of their body, who degenerated
more rapidly than they do. Doubtless, too, the poet desired to make
it clear that Beatrice is not accusing every single human being of
corruption : not all youths learn to break the fasts of the church and
to hate their mothers. The true members of the body of Christ are
uncontaminated. It is the members of the body of the devil who
are degenerate. And since he thought well to use some designation
for that "societas malorum," the one he chose (" primo aspetto ecc.")
was for many reasons the most appropriate, one of those reasons
being that this expression designates the head as well as the body of
the society of the wicked, the first and most rapid instance of pre-
varication. It was an opportunity to use effectively an expression
such as those mentioned by Tichonius and Augustine, which indi-
cate both the head and the body of the devil at the same time.

I anticipate that it will be said that this interpretation is not
simple. All I can say in reply is that the meaning of this pas-
sage no doubt seemed simpler to the author than it does to us;
that this interpretation is based not on a few stray sentences
by obscure authors, but on whole bodies of doctrine in the
writings of Augustine and Gregory, authorities for neglecting
whom Dante blames the churchmen of his day,1 and Aquinas, who
is the poet's chief authority; that if the solution had been simple
to a modern eye, it would long ago have been stated and univer-
sally accepted.2

That union between heaven and earth, which is contrived
throughout the Paradiso by means of the interest that earthly affairs

1 Epist. viii. 7. 11. 114-15.

2 One of the simplest and best interpretations that have been offered is that of
Parodi, according to which "la bella flglia" is the Dawn, daughter of the sun. "Cos!
si fa nera la pelle, che si mostrava bianca al primo apparire di colei, ecc. cioe dell' Aurora.

Ossia: cosi il cielo, di bianco ch'era al mattino, diventa nero la sera " (B.S.D.,

XI, p. 193, n. 2.) But even if we admit that the sky ("il cielo") may properly be called
the skin of the Dawn (not an easy admission), the sky only turns black at night, so that
the skin of the Dawn would turn black only when the Dawn herself is completely absent.
Also the order of the words in the original is an obstacle, for it is difficult to believe
that "Cosi si fa la pelle bianca nera, nel primo aspetto ecc." means the same as: Cosi
si fa nera la pelle, bianca nel primo aspetto ecc.

587

132 J. E. SHAW

have for the saints, is especially noticeable in this twenty-seventh
canto, as Fedele Romani observes.1 But the unity of the worlds
is emphasized by the contrast which is continually drawn between
the earth and the heavenly spheres. The subject of that contrast
is "cupidigia," the sin which was banished from heaven by the
ruler enthroned in the Empyrean, as soon as it made its appearance,
but in which the unhappy mortals on earth are still whelmed until
the time when the promised earthly ruler shall appear.

At the beginning of the canto the poet is still in the eighth
heaven, and the hymn raised by the spirits of the blessed to the Holy
Trinity, together with the sight of what impresses him as a "riso
dell' universe," draws from him the exclamation:

0 gioia! 0 ineffabile allegrezza!
O vita intera d'amore e di pace!
0 senza brama sicura ricchezza!2

Thus the central theme of " cupidigia" is introduced.

Then follows St. Peter's denunciation of covetousness in the
church, the rulers of which are not true members of the body of
Christ, but belong to the body of the devil. The body of God, it
will be remembered, is " mixed," according to the expression of
Tichonius; it is both "fusca et speciosa," " black" and "comely"
in the English version of the Song of Solomon. St. Peter does not
forget the celestial origin of covetousness :

. . . . , onde il perverso,
Che cadde di quassu, laggiu si placa;3

but he concludes with a prophecy of the speedy interposition of
Providence, referring obscurely to the coming of the "Veltro."

The saints soar triumphantly to the Empyrean, and as Dante
follows them with straining eyes, Beatrice calls upon him to gaze
below at the "sito di questa aiuola," the little but central earth,
upon which he is able to see the place where Ulysses made his rash
voyage, and that where Europa mounted the bull, typical instances
of covetousness at work on earth.

Now Dante and Beatrice are wafted up into the Primum Mobile
which, as she explains, is lodged in the heaven of light and love,

i Lectura Dantis, p. 55. * LI. 7-9. » LI. 26-27.

588

"THE EVENING AND THE MORNING WERE ONE DAY" 133

and is the source of time and motion. And now begins the speech
of Beatrice "O cupidigia" which, as Romani explains,1 is the expres-
sion of the feelings aroused in her by the invective of St. Peter.
But whereas the apostle has dealt only with covetousness in the
church, she speaks of it as it appears in the whole body of the devil,
the skin of which turns soon from black to white, just as it did
even sooner in the head of that body. Like Peter she does not
forget the origin of sin in the world, and like Peter she concludes
with a prophecy of the coming of the "Veltro."

A minor motif in the theme of "cupidigia" is the rapidity with
which it operates. In the last lines of the twenty-sixth canto Adam
informs Dante that he fell from the state of innocence in six hours.
Lucifer had fallen in less than twenty seconds. Among the children
of men the process is slower, but still very rapid : with adolescence
the blackening process is complete. The head turns black first
and fastest; in the rest of the body, which is still growing — that is,
in the number of the ill-predestined — the rapidity of the disease is
somewhat delayed but still remarkable.

The comprehensiveness of the view of sin taken by Beatrice,
which includes both its effects and its first cause, its qualities and
its place in God's universe, is appropriate to her character as the
Revealed Truth, which speaks sometimes clearly and sometimes
obscurely, as do the Scriptures. It is characteristic too of Dante, as
it was of Augustine, who always thought of evil as one of his two
"civitates" which divide the whole world.

Of Augustine, Dante says, in that chapter of the De Monarchic,
in which he inveighs against the opponents of the Holy Empire,
"quorum obstinata cupiditas lumen rationis extinxit, et dum ex
patre diabolo sunt, Ecclesiae se filios esse dicunt":2

Sunt etiam scripturae Doctorum, Augustinii et aliorum, quos a Spiritu
Sancto adiutos qui dubitat, fructus eorum vel omnino non vidit, vel si
vidit minime degustavit.3

And to those who still find it strange to suppose that Beatrice
(after describing the rapid perversion of mankind) is summing up

1 Lectura Dantis, p. 46.

2 De Monarchia, III, 3, 11. 45-48.
a Ibid., 11. 87-91.

589

134 ' J. E. SHAW

that description by including in it the head with the whole body of
the "impiorum multitude/' when she says:

Cosl si fa la pelle bianca nera,
Nel primo aspetto della bella figlia
Di Quei ch'apporta mane e lascia sera,

I beg to recommend the words of Augustine already cited:

.... non haesitemus quando a capite ad corpus, vel a corpore transitur
ad caput, et tamen non receditur ab una eademque persona,1

and also the chapters not hitherto mentioned, concerning the body
of the devil, in the De Genesi ad litteram, from one of which the
following extract is taken :

Quod ergo per Isaiam prophetam in eum dicitur: "Quomodo cecidit
de coelo Lucifer mane oriens . . . ." et caetera, quae in figura regis velut
Babylonis in diabolum dicta intelliguntur, plura in ejus corpus conveniunt,
quod etiam de humano genere congregat: et in eos maxime qui ei per super-

biam cohaerent, apostatando a mandatis Dei Et iterum: "Sicut

enim corpus unum est, et membra habet multa, omnia autem membra
corporis cum sint multa, unum est corpus, ita et Christus" (I Cor. XII: 12).
Eo modo etiam corpus diaboli, cui caput est diabolus, id est ipsa impiorum
multitudo, maximeque eorum, qui a Christo vel de Ecclesia sicut de coelo
decidunt, dicitur diabolus, et in ipsum corpus figurate multa dicuntur,
quae non tarn capiti quam corpori membrisque conveniant. Itaque Lucifer
qui mane oriebatur et cecidit, potest intelligi apostatarum genus vel a
Christo, vel ab Ecclesia; quod ita convertitur ad tenebras, amissa luce,
quam portabat, quemadmodum qui convertuntur ad Deum, a tenebris ad
lucem transeunt, id est, qui fuerunt tenebrae lux fiunt.2

J. E. SHAW

TORONTO, CANADA

1 De Doctrina Christiana Lib. Ill, cap. xxxi (ed. cit.. Vol. V, pp. 37-38).

8 De Geneai ad litteram Lib. XI, cap. xxiv (ed. cit.. Vol. V, pp. 540-41) ; cf. also ibid.,
cap. xxv, pp. 541-42.

590

THE MADRID MANUSCRIPT OF THE SPANISH GRAIL
FRAGMENTS. IP

On f. 213 follows La vida de los sanctos padres.

Begins: Aqui comienga el libro que fabla de la mesquindat de la condition
humanal e fue conpuesto por uno que era diacono. E en este libro
se contienen de los amonestamientos e de las vidas de los sanctos
padres. Ay en el veynte e tres capitulos, aunque non estan aqui
todos.

Pregunto uno al abat Antonio: "Que guardare para aplazer a
Dios?" Rrespondio el viejo [e] dixo: "Guarda lo que te mando.
Doquier que vayas, ave sienpre a Dios delante los tus ojos. "

The story just quoted is taken from De vitis Patrum liber quintus,2
sive Verba seniorum\ auctore Graeco incerto, interprete Pelagio S.R.E.
diacono, Migne, LXXIII, c. 851. The Latin text (c. 855) reads:

Interrogavit quidam abbatem Antonium ..., dicens: Quid custodiens
placebo Deo ? Et respondens senex dixit: Quae mando tibi, custodi. Quo-
cunque vadis, Deum semper habe prae oculis tuis: et in his quae agis, adhibe
testificationem sanctarum Scripturarum; et in quocunque loco sederis, non
cito movearis. Haec tria custodi, et salvus eris.

1 offer here an additional specimen of the Spanish text (f . 225) :
^[ Era un hermitano en las partes mas baxas de Egipto, e este era muy

nonbrado, que estava senero en aquel yermo. Segund la obra de Satanas
puso en coragon a una mala mugier desonesta que fuese a el. E ella fuese e
dixolo a unos mangebos: "Que me daredes, e desporne aquel hermitano?"
E posieron con ella de le dar una cosa sabida. E ella salio a la tarde e vyno
a la gela del hermitano, como que andava errada, e ferio a la puerta. Salio
el hermitano e quando la vyo, fue turbado e dixole: "Como veniste aca?"
Dezia ella como llorando: "Ando errada e llegue aqui." E el con grand
piedat metiola en el ** de la gela [f. 225 v} e cerro la puerta. Mas aquella
malaventurada llorava e non quedava de llorar Ifdeziendo: "Abbat, las
bestias me comeran aqui." E el conturbose [e] dezia: "Donde me vyno
estayra?" E abrio la puerta e mandola entrar dentro. E comenco luego
el diablo de aguyjonar el su corac.on con saetas en ella. E quando el entendio

. 1 See Modern Philology, XVIII, 147-56.

2 The Liber quintus has eighteen libelli.

591] 135 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, March, 1921

136 , K. PIETSCH

que eran aguyjones del diablo, dezia: "Las carreras del diablo tenieblas son,
mas del fijo de Dios claridat e luz de vida son." E levantose e encendio la
candela e enflamado dezia: "Los que fazen tales cosas van a los tormentos.
E prueva a ty mismo sy podras sofrir el fuego perdurable. " E pusso el
debdo mas pequeno en la candela, e ardia el dedo. Mas non lo sentia por
el grand encendimiento de la codicia carnal. E f aziendo asy f asta la manana
encendio todos los dedos. Mas aquella malaventurada veyendo lo que el f azia
uvo muy grand miedo e tornose tal como piedra. ^[ E en la manana venieron
los mangebos que la avyan enbiada al monte, e Uamaron a la puerta. Dixie-
ron: "Vyno aca ayer tarde una tal mugier?" Dixo el ermitano: "Sy,
ela do duerme." E entraron e fallaronla muerta. E descobriose el manto
e mostroles las manos. Dixo: "Vet que me fizo esta fija del diablo, que me
fizo perder todos mis dedos!" E conto todo el fecho, como fuera. Dezia
en su coragon: "Non es de rrendir mal por mal; que asy es escripto." E
fizo a Dios oracion por ella. E rresucitola Dios por su rruego, e convertiose
ella e vyvyo castramientre todo el tienpo de la su vida.

The Latin text (c. 883) reads:

Solitarius quidam erat in inferioribus Aegypti, et hie erat nominatissimus,
quia solus in ecclesia sedebat in deserto loco. Et ecce, juxta operationem
Satanae, mulier quaedam inhonesta audiens de eo, dicebat juvenibus: Quid
mini vultis dare, et depono istum solitarium vestrum? Illi autem con-
stituerunt ei certum quid quod darent ei. Quae egressa vespere, venit
velut errans ad cellam ejus; et cum pulsaret ad cellam, egressus est ille;
et videns earn turbatus est, dicens: quomodo hue advenisti? Ilia autem
velut plorans, dicebat: Errando hue veni. Qui cum miseratione viscerum
pulsaretur, introduxit earn in atriolum cellulae suae, et ipse intravit interius
in cellam suam, et clausit. Et ecce infelix ilia clamavit, dicens: Abba,
ferae me comedent hie. Ille autem iterum turbatus est, timens etiam
judicium Dei, dicebat: Unde mihi venit ira haec? Et aperiens ostium,
introduxit earn intro. Coepit autem diabolus velut sagittis stimulare cor
ejus in earn. Qui cum intellexisset diaboli esse stimulos, dicebat in semetipso :

Viae inimici tenebrae sunt; Filius autem Dei lux est Surgens ergo

accendit lucernam. Et cum inflammaretur desiderio, dicebat: Quoniam

qui talia agunt, in tormentis vadunt Proba ergo teipsum ex hoc,

si potes sustinere ignem aeternum. Et mittebat digitum suum in lucernam.
Quern cum incendisset, et arderet, non sentiebat propter nimiam flammam
concupiscentiae carnalis. Et ita usque mane faciens, incendit omnes digitos.
Ilia autem infelix videns quod faciebat, a timore velut lapis facta est. Et
venientes juvenes mane ad monachum ilium, dicebant: Venit hie mulier
sero? Ille autem dixit: Etiam; ecce ubi dormit. Et intrantes invenerunt
eammortuam. Etdicunt: Abba, mortua est. Tune ille recutiens palliolum
suum, quo utebatur, ostendit eis manus suas, dicens: Ecce quod mihi fecit
filia ista diaboli, perdidit omnes digitos meos. Et narrans eis quod factum

592

THE MADRID MANUSCRIPT OF THE SPANISH GRAIL 137

fuerat, dicebat: Scriptum est, ne reddas malum pro malo Et

faciens orationem, suscitavit earn. Quae conversa, caste egit residuum
tempus vitae suae.

This is a very well-known story.1 The scholars who have dis-
cussed it most recently are probably Mene*ndez Pidal, Studies in
Honor of A. Marshall Elliott, II (1911), 261, and Wendland, De
fabellis antiquis earumque ad christianos propagatione, 1911, 15.
Wendland refers to the study by Rabbow, Die Legende des Martinian,
Wiener Studien, XVII (1895), 253.

The Vida de los sanctos padres ends on f. 237V:

Un onbre sancto oyo que peccara uno e lloro amargosamientre. Dixo:
" Tu oy e yo eras. " ** " Enpero que alguno ante ti pecco, non2 lo judgues.
Mas judga a ti por mas peccador que a otro. "

This story is from De vitis Patrum liber Septimus, sive Verba
seniorum auctore Graeco incerto, interprete Paschasio S.R.E. diacono,
Migne, LXXIII, c. 1025. The Latin text (c. 1039) reads:

Unus ex sanctis Patribus videns alium negligentem, flevit amare, dicens:
Vae mini, quia quomodo hodie iste peccat, sic et ego crastino. Et monebat
discipulum suum, dicens: Quamvis aliquis graviter praesente te peccaverit,
ne condemnes eum; sed sic apud te sit, tanquam tu plus eo pecces, quamvis
ille saecularis sit, nisi forte Deum blasphemaverit, quod est haereticorum.

Beer, Handschriftenschdtze Spaniens, notes the following Latin
MSS of the Vitae patrum: pp. 124 Celanova — Vitae Patrum de Graeco
in Latinum translatae per Paschasium ad Martinum Presbyterum et
Abbatem~s. XIII3; 224 Eslonza— Vitas Patrum— 1099; 252 San
Juan de las Abadesas— 1458; 361 Montes— 915; 370 Ona— s. XII;
412 Ripoll— 1046; 455 Silos—? ; 462 Sobrado— 956; 541 Vega
—950; 543 Vich— 1457; 557 Viniagio— 873. To these is to be added
a MS formerly belonging to the Conde de Haro and now in the
National Library. Paz y Melia, Rev. Arch. Bibl Mus., I (1897), 66,
gives the following description: Fol. 1.°, l.a col. Continentur in hoc
libro adhortationes sanctorum patrum ad profectum perfectionis
monachor. Tabla. — 2.a col.: Incipiunt adhortationes sanctorum

1 Noted e.g. at least eight times in Herbert: 20, 66, 460, 468, 517, 563, 583, 656.

2 MS. peqno.

3 This number is either the date of the MS, or the date of its presentation to some
convent, etc., or the date of the catalogue from which the MS is cited. The range of
these dates indicates in general the popularity of the work.

593

138 ,K. PIETSCH

patrum. Emp. InterrogavitquidambeatumAntoniumdicens: . . . .l

Letra del siglo XIV. Vitela. [82] Hojas Other MSS of

which we have no record probably existed. It is also likely that the
work was translated early into Spanish as into French, English,
German, and Italian. I find; however, no trace of a Spanish trans-
lation in MS. The first printed editions of which I know are those
of Zaragoza [c. 1491] (Haebler, Zentralbl. f. Bibl, XXVI, 155)2, of
Salamanca, 1498 (Cat. Salvd, II, 824 = Haebler, Bibliografia iberica
del siglo XV, 157, No. 336), of Sevilla, 1538 (Cat. Ticknor, 406:
a translation into "fine old Castilian"), and of Toledo, 1553 (Cat.
Ticknor, 172) .»

The great histories of Spanish literature are surprisingly silent on
this subject. Ticknor, though he possessed the last two copies
mentioned, nowhere in his History speaks of the Vitae patrum.
The Spanish and the German translations of Ticknor are also silent.
Rios (IV, 308) in discussing the sources of [Climente Sanchez]
Libro de los Enxemplos, among which, according to the author's own
repeated statement, are Las Vidas de los santos Padres, misses a good
chance to tell us something about the work. He lets a second oppor-
tunity pass by in VI, 45, where he deals with translations of such
works as the Legenda aurea and the Conlationes patrum. Baist
(414) mentions the Vitae patrum only in connection with Climente
Sanchez. Finally, the author of the Origenes de la Novela gives
(I, CIII) merely as one of the sources of the Libro de exemplos the
Vidas y colaciones de los Santos Padres. I am afraid that he has
merged here two different works into one : Vitae patrum and Johannis
Cassiani Conlationes XXIIII.4

i A French MS (Hist, litt., XXXIII, 323) begins in a similar way: Ci comencent lea
enhortemens des sains Peres e les perfections des moines lesquels sains Jeromes translata et
mist de grec en latin. Uns hons demanda a I' abbe Antoine et dist: ....

* The translator was Gonzalo Garcia de Santa Maria. The work is attributed to
Saint Hieronymus. P. Meyer, Hist, litt., XXXIII, 315: On mettait frgquemment sous
le nom de saint Jer6me 1'ensemble des 6crits varies que Ton designait par le titre vague de
Vitae OU Vitas patrum.

By the way, neither the Caton en latin y en romance, of which Haebler speaks on
page 154 of his article, nor the Arte de bien morir, bound together with the Caton and
described by Haebler, Bibl. iber., 356, was discovered by P. Fernandez. It was I who
first called the attention of P. Fernandez to these works. Cf. my Notes on two Old
Spanish Versions of the Disticha Catonis, pp. 11-12.

8 Under Hieronymus.

4 For Cassianus in Spain, see Beer, 615; for Catalan translations, see also Morel-
Fatio, GrSber's Qrundr., II, II, 90, and Schiff, La bibliotheque du marquis de Santillane,
160; for Portuguese translations, C. Michaelis de Vasconcellos, Grober's Grundr., II,
II, 212.

594

THE MADRID MANUSCRIPT OF THE SPANISH GRAIL 139

On f . 237V follows El libro de Frey Johan de Rrocacisa.

Begins: En el nonbre de Dios. Aqui comienga el libro que conpuso
Frey Juan de Rrocacisa, frayre de la orden de Sant Fran-
cisco, de las cosas maravillosas y1 espantos que han de
(venir e) acontecer2 en los tienpos que han de [venir], el qual
llamo: Buen amigo, non te partas de mi en el tienpo de la
tribulacion. El comiengo del qual es este que se sygue: A
vos, Frey Pedro, maestro de fisica, de la orden de Sant
Francisco, yo, Frey Juan, frayre sobredicho, de la misma
orden, rrequerido por vos e rrogado3 que vos declarase e
denunciase algunas cosas de los spantos e temores que han
de venir cedo y en breve tienpo sobre todo el mundo,
digovos e fagovos de cierto que

Ends on f . 251 : El qual tratado e cada una cosa de quanto en el es, dize e
fabla homildosamente so hemienda e correpcion del sancto
padre e cardenales, patriarchas e argobispos e obispos, e[n]
enxalgamiento de la sancta madre yglesia de Rroma e de la
corte gelestial. Amen. Deo gragias.

The present text is a translation of Jean de la Roche-TailleVs4
Vade mecum in tribulatione, written in 13565 and printed (only once)
by Brown, Fasciculus rerum expetendarum & fugiendarum, II,
Londini, 1690, 496.6

On the early acquaintance of the Iberian Peninsula with Jean
de la Roche-Taillee, I may quote from Morel-Fatio (Grober's Grundr.,
II, II, 111): "Wie es scheint, beschaftigten sich die Konige Aragons
im 14. und 15. Jh. hauptsachlich deshalb mit Astrologie, weil sie sich
der Genauigkeit gewisser Weissagungen und Prophezeiungen verge-
wissern wollten, welche sog. Erleuchtete und Schwindler, wie der

1 This form does not occur in the texts which I shall publish.

2 MS acontescer.
s MS rrogase.

4 Thus I write the name with L' Intermediate, I, 205b. Other forms are Roche-
taillade (Proissart (Kervyn de Lettenhove], Dollinger), Roche Tranchee (Ulstade-Brunet).
Roquetaillade (Bayle, Chevalier, Wetzer-Welte, Buchberger). The ordinary Lathi form
is Rupescissa (Brown, Pabricius, Brunet, Graesse).

'3 Vade mecum, 497.

• The Vade mecum is preceded by the same author's Prophetia (494), written hi 1349
and frequently printed since the beginning of the sixteenth century as a part of the
Mirabilis liber qui prophetias Reuelationesque nee non res mirandas preteritas presentes et
futuras aperte demonstrat. Together with the other Lathi parts of the Mirabilis liber,
the Prophetia has been translated into modern French and printed at Paris, 1831. Thus
I glean from Cat. Rothschild, I, 119, whose compiler, however, is wrong in identifying the
author of the Prophetia with "Jean de La Roche-Taillee ... cardinal (m. en 1437)"
and crediting the latter with the authorship of De consideratione quintae essentiae rerum.

595

140 t K. PIETSCH

Franziskaner Johann von Roquetaillade, Lasa, Turmeda, Cervera
u.a. veroffentlichten und in grosser Anzahl verbreiteten. " A note to
this statement reads: "Die Prophezeiungen von Rocatallada, Lasa
und Turmeda, in katalanischer Sprache, sind in eine Hs. des 15. Jhs.
der Bibliothek von Carpentras eingetragen (Lambert, I.e., I, 174). l

The earliest references to Jean de la Roche-Taillee in Spanish
literature as also the only ones I have, are these : Del fuerte leon suso
contenido disc el Merlin, concuerda fray Juan, Villasandino, C. Baena,
176, and Qesardn muchos prof etas De Merlin et Rocacisa, Juan Alfonso
de Baena, Antologia, II, 261.

On f. 251-282 follows Josep Abarimatia.

On f . 282v-296 follows Merlin.

On f . 296V follow Los articulos e fe de los cristianos.

Begin: Titulo de la sancta fe e crehencia de los fieles cristianos. La
santa fe de los cristianos es tener e creher firmamente los
quatorze2 articulos: VII. de la divinidat e siete de la
humanidat

End on f. 298: E destos sacramentos los tres non se doblan e son: batismo,
confirmacion, orden de clerigo. If E los quatro se doblan:
penitencia, cuerpo de Dios, extrema uncion, matrimonio.

I have not succeeded in finding anything on this text.

On f . 298V-300V follows Langarote.

Josep Abarimatia) Merlin, and Langarote will be published by me

in a year or two.

K. PIETSCH
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

1 Lambert is not accessible to me. A Catalan translation of another of Jean de la
Roche-Taill6e's works is described by Morel-Patio, Cat. des mss. espagnols et des mss.
portugais [de la Bibl. Nat.], 36 b.

2 MS quatoreze.

596

OLD SPANISH GIRGONQA

In the Libro de Buen Amor, copla 1610 (ed. Ducamin), Juan
Ruiz likens the mujeres chicas to small precious stones, and says :
En pequena girgonga yace grand rresplandor.

Cejador, in his edition of the Libro de Buen Amor, has the fol-
lowing comment on girgonga: "piedra fina. Villena, Cis. 3: Asy
como rubi e diamante e girgonga." The Diccionario de Terreros
(II, 391) defines jirgonga as "especie de piedra contra el veneno,"
and also quotes Villena. Zerolo has a similar explanation.

As will be noted, the definitions given are all vague and do not
give any clear idea as to the identity of the stone. In reading Marie
de France, Le Fraisne, it occurred to me that OSp girgonga might
be traced to the OFr jagonce, which Warnke translates "rubin."1
Concerning the latter word very copious material can be found in
Pannier's Les lapidaires frangais, where the following forms are found :
jagonce, jagunce, jagonces, jacinte, jacincte, jacynthe, supposedly
derived from the Latin hyadnthus through the Greek vauvBos. The
gender varies. Schuchardt2 discusses the word in detail and doubts
the etymology suggested by one of A. Thomas' pupils: hyadnthus
mixed -with Zakynthus? He admits, however, the possibility of a
contamination of hyadnthus, -ia, with OFr jargon, from Ital. giargone
(compared in the Dictionnaire General with OFr jagonce, jargonce).
He traces the word from the Greek vaiavdos to the Syriac yaqunta
(ydkunda), and believes that the Syrians, who traded with France
in Merovingian times, first brought the stone to the country.
According to Schuchardt, it seems plausible that the OFr form was
derived from the Syriac.

Godefroy, in addition to the forms already mentioned, has the
following : jargunces, jacunces, jagonses, gagonce. The English word

1 Karl Warnke, Die Lais der Marie de France (Halle, 1900), p. 59.

2 Zeits. fur rom. Phil., XXVI, 398, 589, and XXVIII, 146. The following forms are
quoted: MHG idchant, iachant, Russ. HXOHTt, Arab, ydqtit. Mod. Pers. y&kand. Old
Armen. yakunf, Georg. iagunda.

» Modern Zante: Old Greek Zakynthos, the island opposite the bay of Corinth;
cf. also Saguntum, now Murviedro in Spain, said to have been founded by Greeks from
Zakynthos.
597] 141 [ MODERN PHILOLOGY, March, 1921

142 Ay)is RICHARD NYKL

jargon, or jargoon, is defined in Murray's New English Dictionary
as "a translucent, colourless or smoky variety of the mineral zircon,
a silicate of zirconia, found in Ceylon. " Murray also refers to the
Ptg. zarcdo, Arab, zarqun, from the Persian zar-gun = gold-colored.
The Lapidaire de Marbode mentions three varieties:

L'une est granate, altre citrine,
L'altre evage,

and according to their color they have different magic properties:
Tutes confortent par vigur,
Vains pensers toilent e tristur.

The best of all is claimed to be the bright red one, called the
jagonce grenas (also sarde, jagonce granas de sarde, jagonce balais).
As to the various magic or protecting qualities of this stone, compare
Pannier's work (pp. 79, 125, 242, 280, 292).

Professor K. Pietsch called my attention to the Lapidario de
Alfonso el Sabio} compiled in 1250, and to Don Juan Manuel's
El libro del Cauallero et del Escudero,1 written about 1326. In the
first, three varieties of iargonga are mentioned: vermeia, amariella,
and blanca, and their magic properties are described at length.
The second mentions the word in the following passage: "las pre-
cjosas [i.e., piedras] son asi commo carbunculos et Rubis et diamantes
et esmeraldas et balaxes et prasmas et ^aphires et Q ardeiias et girgonzas
et estopazas et aljofares et torquesas et calgadonias et cristales et
otras piedras que fallan enlas animalias." The Lapidario also
mentions yacoth, of which it says: "De la tercera faz del signo
cancro: es la piedra que a nombre en arauigo yacoth alaazfor et en
latin iargonga amariella et algunos le dixieron otrossi safir chitrino. "

To sum up:

1. Girgonga (iargongd) belongs to the group of precious stones
which are silicates of zirconia (also spelled circonia, jargonia), and
are of various colors, mostly white, yellow, and red, the last variety
being considered the best of all and generally called hyacinth or
jacinth. The variety known as jargon (jargoon) is of yellow, green,
or brown color, but never red.2

1 Rornanische Forschungen, VII, 513.

2 Of. Encyclopaedia Britannica, «.t>. Meyer's Konversations Lexikon: "1st farblos,
selten welss und wasserhell, meist hyazinthrot (hyazinth) oder braunlich, auch gelb oder
grtin, glasglanzend. Die hyazinthroten Varietaten sind geschatzte Edelsteine; die
blassgelben und farblosen, auch die ktinstlich durch Erhitzen entfarbten kommen als
Maturadiamanten oder Jargon de Ceylan in den Handel. "

OLD SPANISH "GIRGONCA" 143

2. It was probably first imported from the East, though it is
also found in the alluvial sands in the Ural, in Norway, in Bohemia,
in France, in Italy, in Australia, and in the United States.1 In
Pannier's work (p. 280), the country of its origin is mentioned three
times:

Que on entre deus mers la trueve,
En Tisle qui a non Chorynthe2
La est apele"e jacynte.
A coulor de ruby retrait ...
Pres d'Ethyope est cele terre
Ou on vait cele pierre querre.

3. It is the same variety of stone as the OFr jagonce, and has
the same protective qualities. In the lay of Le Fraisne (11. 127 ff.)
the ring containing the stone is to protect a child from harm:

A une piece d'un suen laz
un gros anel li lie al braz.
De fin or i aveit une unce;
el chastun out une jagunce;
la verge entur esteit letree.

The Lapidaire de Berne says (p. 126) :

En jacincte ha riche juiel,
Bien est digne d'estre en anel
Quar cil qui le porte sor soi
Pendue au col ou en son doi
Seiirs puet estre, ce m'est vis,
Par la terre et par le pals:
Pestilance et corrupcion
Ne autre tribulacion
Ne li nuist por terre changier
Ne por son pais estrangier.

According to the Lapidario, 96 v. :

Et su uertud es atal que el que la troxiere consigo sera bien andant
en mar: et en caga de bestias.

The Didionnaire Infernal of J. Collin de Plancy (p. 279) says
of the hyacinthe: "pierre precieuse que Ton pendait au cou pour se

1 Cf . New International Encyclopedia, article "Zircon." The etymology given
there is as follows: Prom Arab. zarMn (cinnabar, vermilion), Pers. zarg&n (golden,
yellow, from: zar, Skrt. hiranya*=gold, and o&n, Avestan 0aono«color).

2 Here possibly an allusion is made to Zante (Zakynthos), opposite the Bay of
Corinth, formerly a considerable trade center for jewels.

144 AL?IS RICHARD NYKL

de*fendre de la peste. De plus elle fortifiait le coeur, garantissait
de la foudre, et augmentait les richesses et les honneurs."

4. It is not a "ruby," as Warnke and others translate it.1 It
will be noted that all the references quoted make a clear distinction
between jagonce, iargonga and the ruby, which the Lapidario calls
robi. The archpriest mentions ruby as evidently a different stone,
in copla 1613: "Como rroby pequenno tyene mucha bondad. "

5. The etymology of the French and Spanish word is rather
to be sought in the Greek vcuavdos, possibly through the Syrian
variant ydquntd and contamination with giargone, as Schuchardt
suggests, than in the Arab, zarqun and Pers. zargun. It seems
probable that the stone became more widely known in Europe
after the Crusades.

6. The OFr word being mentioned in the Chanson de Roland
(ca. 1110) and in Marie's Lais (ca. 1160), it seems to be older than
the Spanish iargonga, the earliest instance of which appears to be
the Lapidario (1250). It would, therefore, seem plausible to assume
that it passed from French into Spanish.

What color had the archpriest in mind ? In another passage
(copla 1387) he speaks of a shining gafir being found by a cock,
and inasmuch as the yellow variety of iargonga was also called safir
chitrino it may be that he means the same stone. From the attribute
"grand rresplandor" we might infer that he means the white, dia-
mond-like variety. Personally I am inclined to think that he means
the bright red one, first, because he likens it to mujeres chicas, whose
red cheeks and lips he likes so well, and second, because this variety
was considered to be the most precious of all girgongas.

ALOIS RICHARD NYKL
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

1 Eugene Mason in his translation of Le Fraisne (French Medieval Romances, p. 93)
uses the more nearly correct term "garnet." With regard to Arab, ydqut and Mod.
Pers. yagand. Professor Sprengling informs me that it may at times very well be ruby,
red sapphire, etc. (In the aljamiado texts, al-yaquta is used to designate this variety of
stone.) He believes that the Arabic word is derived from the Persian, and the latter
may well be derived from the Aramaic (resp. Syriac) .

600

THE NEW MANUSCRIPT OF ILLE ET GALERON

The poem of Ille et Galeron by Gautier d'Arras has been known
only from the very defective Paris manuscript (fonds frang ais, 373).
In 1911, Mr. W. H. Stevenson made a report to the British Manu-
scripts Commission upon the manuscript treasures found at Wollaton
Hall and quoted liberally from the prologue and epilogue of a new
text of the poem.1 A brief notice of this discovery was made in an
obscure corner of Romania, in 1913 (XLII, 145). So far as I know,
the only other mention of this find is in Professor Sheldon's article,
"On the Date of Ille et Galeron," Modern Philology, XVII, 1919.2
Through the kindness of Lord and Lady Middleton and Mr. Steven-
son, I have been fortunate enough to secure a rotograph of the new
text. A comparison of this with the Paris manuscript shows inter-
esting and important differences. I shall here briefly indicate these
differences and shall also discuss the conclusions reached by Professor
Sheldon.

Mr. Stevenson states that the new manuscript is in an early
thirteenth-century French hand and in the Picard dialect. A careful
examination of the new text indicates that it is in the hand of at
least two scribes. The past participles of the first conjugation end
in -t, as do nouns like gret. The Picard features differ as between
the earlier and later folios of the text and certain Anglo-Norman
features have been introduced. The only indication of the history
of the volume is the name "John' Bertrem, de Thorp Kilton"
(County York) in a fifteenth-century hand (fo. 347v). The text is
in two columns of forty-seven or forty-eight verses each. It contains
illuminated initials and seven miniatures in colors.3 Practically

1 Report on the Manuscripts of Lord Middleton, preserved at Wollaton Hall, Notting-
hamshire, Hereford, 1911, pp. 221 f.

2 Since this was written Brandin's edition of the Chanson d'Aspremont ("Classiques
francais du moyen-age," Vol. XIX), which is made from the Wollaton manuscript, has
come to my attention.

» 157r. Lamb with banner of Cross; 158r. Boy Ille with dragon; 160r. Rogelyon in
armor on horseback; 164r. Ille and the Roman emperor; 170r. Ille and Ganor; 175t».
Ille and the emperor again; 185r. Ganor. It is interesting to note that neither Duke
Conain nor his sister Galeron are pictured, while Ganor and her father appear twice.
The illustrator, at least, was more interested in the Roman part of the romance than
he was in the Breton.
601] 145 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, March, 1921

146 FHEDERICK A. G. COWPER

all of the text is legible. A few letters are blurred here and there,
but almost all can be restored with the aid of the Paris manu-
script. Two words are frequently written as one. The scribe used
damaged parchment in several instances, for one page which bears
stitches and several with holes show the text intact, written around
the damaged spots.

The poem contains 5,835 verses, 757 less than the Paris manu-
script. This is the net loss, for 1,182 lines of the Paris manuscript
are missing, while there are 425 new lines. Necessarily there are
important differences. The losses of lines are mainly in the prologue,
in Ille's earlier battles, and in the account of the courtship of Ille
and Galeron. The chief additions are in the kidnaping and rescue
of Ganor, and in the epilogue. There are innumerable minor changes
of letter, word, or word-order, almost all of which clear up contro-
verted points. The larger part of Foerster's notes are now obsolete.
In many cases, Loseth's emendations are justified by the new text.

The rhymes are generally exact. Identical rhymes and two
couplets on the same rhyme syllable are more frequent than in the
Paris manuscript. There is but one lacuna, the rhyme pair to verse
1255 (after 1938, Paris) being lacking. The verse does not occur
in the Paris manuscript, and it very clearly does not belong where
it stands.1

Seventy-three lines of the old prologue are missing. The allu-
sions to Germany are lacking and the eulogy of Beatrice is reduced in
other ways.2 Of the 13 new lines, one fills the lacuna after 117,3
two are added to the discussion of Envy,4 and after 131 are added
the ten following:

W. 63 Molt par me torne a grant anui
Quant ainc ma dame ne conui;
65 Molt me fust encor plus soef .
Or m'estuet sigler a plain tref
Por $als ataindre qui ains murent
Et qui ainc (1. ains) de moi le conurent.
Tols les premiers volrai ataindre;

1 P(aris) 1255 " Icil i vint molt erramment. "

2 P. 8-19, 23-54, 79-10$, 107-10, and 132.

3 P. 46 " Tant come honors loe et conselle. "

4 W(ollaton) 57 "Li drois d'envie est une ardors

Qui li fait hair les mellors. "

602

THE NEW MANUSCRIPT OF "!LLE ET GALERON" 147

70 Car molt a entre faire et faindre.
Servir le voel si com jo sai;
Car a s'onor voel faire .i. lai
De Galeron, etc.

These lines might well be taken into consideration in connection
with any argument regarding the date of the poem. Does Gautier
mean that he did not know Beatrice until after the coronation at
Rome, and that he wishes to enjoy as much of the new Empress'
favor as those who had known her before she had risen to her full
height of fame ? This would seem to favor, for the beginning of the
poem, a date somewhere near August 1, 1167.

Line 72, if it is Gautier's, is very important, for in it the poem
itself is referred to as a "lai." Unfortunately we cannot compare
it with the famous passage (P. 929-36) criticizing lais, for that
passage does not occur in this version. If this passage belongs in
the original manuscript, it clearly does not refer to any possible source
in a lai d'llle et de Galeron: the lais which Gautier is criticizing are
those of Marie de France, which were probably then enjoying great
popularity in the French courts.

In the description of the first battle fought by Ille against Hoe'l,
his traditional enemy, when Ille returns from exile in France
(P. 277-546) , we find many lines in changed order. While 20 new lines
appear, 291 are missing, including all the plays on the numbers of
knights and those where the French knights show a certain nervous-
ness (P. 447-63). The 100 lines recounting the exploits of Bruns
d'Orleans and Estout de Langres (P. 578-677) are absent, and the
role of Hoe'l is greatly abbreviated.

In the episode of the battle with Rogelyon, the rejected suitor
and nephew of Hoe'l, 62 lines are missing, while 9 are added.

In the courtship of Ille and Galeron 185 lines are dropped, 13
added. The monologues of the two lovers are entirely omitted,
as is the pretty scene in which Conain drags from his sister the
confession of her feelings. In this more primitive version, Conain
offers Galeron to Ille, and, when the offer is Accepted, goes and
tells the girl to get ready at once for the wedding. We are here
closer to the spirit of the chanson de geste than to that of the courtly
epic. The faulty connection at this point indicates, however, that

603

148 FREDRICK A. G. COWPER

at least some of the lines in the Paris manuscript belonged in the
original.

The important episode in which Ille lost an eye is quite different.
The 32 lines (P. 1625-56) which tell of his triumph in the tournament
and his unlucky decision to try just one more tilt are missing and in
their place are the six following :

W. 981 Un jor estoit en une guerre;
Si prist le segnor de la terre
Devant le castiel qu'il avoit.
Mais uns de gals que il tenoit
Al rembarer la forteresce
Retorne al pont et si s'adrece.
De la lance qu'il porte en destre
Fiert Ylle, etc.

This decided difference between the two versions suggests the
possibility that Gautier himself made two versions of his poem,
one for Beatrice and another for Thibaut. The absence of the
tournament scene from the Wollaton manuscript recalls the opposi-
tion to this form of sport. It had been forbidden by a papal decree
of 1131, renewed in 1139,1 participants were threatened with excom-
munication, and ecclesiastical burial was to be denied anyone who
might be killed.

The episode in which the wounded Ille slips away to a castle so
as not to see his wife, and she succeeds in getting into his presence,
is much improved by the insertion of the following lines after P. 1754:

1069 A bien petit que ne se tue;

D'uns dras a home s'est vestue.

In the catalogue of countries visited by Galeron in further pur-
suit of her elusive husband, there are some marked changes. In
verse 1295 (P. 1988) Bresaliande replaces Nohuberlande; in 1297
(P. 1990) Auvergne is replaced by Norouerge and Normendie is
added; in 1301 (P. 1994) Esclavonie is replaced by Bougerie; and
two new lines (1306-7) after P. 1998 bring in Borgoigne.

In Ille's first battle for the Roman emperor against the Greeks
there are only minor changes; 33 lines are added, 23 subtracted.

* Young Henry of Champagne and the king's brother Robert held a great tournament
at Easter, 1149, in spite of the very vigorous efforts of St. Bernard to have the Abb6
Suger, regent of Prance, Count Thibaut (father of Henry and our patron Thibaut), and
other notables forbid it. See Arbois de Jubainville, Histoire des dues et des comtes de
Champagne, III, 21-24.

604

THE NEW MANUSCRIPT OF "!LLE ET GALERON" 149

The second battle, in which the seneschal is killed, is substantially
the same in both versions. In the third battle, where Ille com-
mands as acting seneschal, the differences are more numerous,
though of little importance: 135 lines are dropped, 16 added.

After P. 3504, the following new lines add clearness to the
emperor's offer:

2674 Ma fille aura a son deport

Et tolt Pempire aprie*s ma mort.

The next important changes are in the scene in which the
messengers report their vain search for Galeron. The Wollaton
manuscript omits the entire speech in which Ille laments his loss
(3897-3938), as well as the 26 lines in which is related Ganor's
eagerness for a speedy wedding (3956-79). In the account of the
festivities on the eve of the wedding, one adds to the list of quota-
tions attesting the popularity of the Breton lais:

3094 (P. 3984) Cil jogleor harpent et notent,
Vielent et cantent et rotent
Ces lais bretons entros qu'en son.

In the scene at the church door, the Wollaton manuscript omits
the 31 lines (P. 4225-55) in which Galeron expatiates upon the
prayers she will offer for Ille if he will place her in a convent, and
substitutes for them five of a more worldly and realistic type :

3344 " Se tos li mondes ert a moi

Ne me valroit il rien sans toi
Ne me poroie joie atendre."

Cil le voit bele et blance et tendre
Et voit le cors bien fait et gent.
Ja le baisast devant la gent (P. 4256).

In the account of Die's second visit to Italy, several scenes are
amplified. The messenger who informs him of the abduction of
Ganor gives him directions as to the best means of waylaying the
abductors. The attack and the rescue are described in greater
detail, 60 new lines appearing. Twenty-eight additional lines by
way of summary, and 28 in further description of the joy of the newly
wedded pair and their court, mark the remaining important additions
to the body of the poem. The 30 new lines of prologue will be men-
tioned in connection with Professor Sheldon's article.

605

150 FREDERICK A. G. COWPER

In his interesting and illuminating discussion, Professor Sheldon
attacks the generally accepted dating of Ilk. He criticizes Foerster's
statement that the poem must have been composed shortly after
the Roman coronation, August 1, 1167, mentioned in verse 69,1
and pleads for a later date. He considers that the critics who have
given 1167 or 1168 as the date of the poem have failed to prove their
point. I agree with him that the only points absolutely fixed are
1164 as the earliest date for Erode, 1167 the earliest for Ille, 1191
the latest for Erode, and 1184 the latest for Ille; but I do not
quite follow his argument for a later date for Ille. He says first
(p. 385) that the poet's reference in the prologue to the coronation
does not preclude a much later date than 1167, as the coronation was
important enough to be mentioned at any time; second, that it is
doubtful if Gautier would have written his prologue, or retained it if
written, while the Empress was in Italy or during the flight from
Rome, because she would not have been in a receptive mood for the
poet's offering then or for some years after, perhaps not till 1174, or
even until after 1 178. Professor Sheldon himself is not fully satisfied
with the validity of this argument, for he says (p. 391) :

The tantalizing lines 9*-18*, with what may have immediately preceded
them, seem to allude to something that caused an absence which led him to
consider another patron, though he had not lost hope of some recognition
from the Empress.2 Did he perhaps begin his poem while the Empress was
in Italy, hoping for her return before or soon after its completion, and then
because this return was delayed (in which case we should naturally think
of her stay of nearly four years in Italy, 1174-78), or because he had some
other reason, whatever it was, did he finish with praise of the count as well
as of her? Whatever had happened, it looks as if a fairly long interval
elapsed between beginning and end.

This latter point of view (except for the dates 1174-78) seems to
me the more nearly correct. The poet was about to compose his
work in honor of the new Empress. He was determined to win as
much favor as those poets who had known her longer, but, for some
reason, in his epilogue he changed his dedication to another patron,
Thibaut, whom he applauded as her equal. Was not this action
eminently appropriate to the black days after the coronation and

1 W. 25, " Rome le vit ja coroner. "

2 The lines are less obscure if 7* and 8* are placed before 5*. according to a suggestion
made by Professor T. A. Jenkins.

606

THE NEW MANUSCRIPT OF "!LLE ET GALERON" 151

the flight from Italy ? If Beatrice had been in a mood for generosity,
the poet would have had no reason to seek another patron. But,
as Professor Sheldon himself says, there is nothing conclusive about
any of this argument. There is, however, a possibility of narrowing
down somewhat the question of the date. Professor Sheldon is
convinced from verses 6592-1 * :

W. 5805 Gaiters d'Arras qui s'entremist

D'Eracle ains qu'il fesist cest uevre,

that Eracle was written before Ille. I think that the definitions of
the verb s'entremetre given in Godefroy will bear me out in my claim
that the only thing proved by these lines is that Gautier began
Eracle first. The text of Eracle bears the marks of having been
written in three different parts, of which at least one was written
after Ille. This opinion is strengthened by evidence in the Wollaton
manuscript. The argument for the conclusion that Ille was finished
before Eracle may be briefly stated as follows:

For Eracle there were three patrons or three phases of patronage:
(1) Thibaut V of Blois, alone mentioned in the prologue; (2) Thibaut
and Marie of Champagne, his sister-in-law, mentioned at the begin-
ning of the epilogue; (3) Baudouin of Hainaut, mentioned in the
epilogue as cause of the poem's completion and the person to whom
it was being sent.

For Ille there are two patrons : (1) Beatrice of Burgundy, Empress
of Germany, alone mentioned in the prologue; (2) Beatrice and
Thibaut, mentioned in the epilogue, the former as the cause of the
beginning of the work, the latter as the cause of its completion.

If we accepted the theory that Eracle was completed before Ille,
we should be obliged to take with it not only the conclusion that
Gautier broke off with Thibaut and Marie, and finished Eracle for
Baudouin, but also that he thereupon began a work for Beatrice,
deserted her, and returned to his former patron Thibaut. Is this
probable ? I am convinced that Ille must have been completed during
the period when Gautier was working for the Champagne-Blois
group and before he attached himself to Baudouin, consequently
that Ille} while begun later than Eracle, was completed before it.

We are now confronted with the question as to whether the last
patron is Baudouin IV or Baudouin V: if the former, both poems

607

152 FREDERICK A. G. COWPER

must be placed before 1171, the year of his death. That would
allow a margin of four years from 1167, the year of the coronation,
when Thibaut's interest in Ille had not yet been sought. The
closer Eracle is placed to the later date, the farther may Ille be
removed from 1167, but at the extreme outside it could hardly be
later than 1170. In case Baudouin V is the patron, the problem
is no nearer settlement than before, 1184 for Ille and 1191 for Eracle
being the limits.

Foerster preferred Baudouin IV, considering Baudouin V as
too young.1 Professor Sheldon states that this choice "is of doubtful
correctness," but does not give his reasons. I hope I have shown
that his whole plea for a later date for Ille depends upon that choice
being incorrect. In my own investigation of the subject, I have
preferred Baudouin V, largely for the reasons that he was known
as a patron of letters, while his father was not; that he was brother-
in-law of that well-known literary patron, Philip of Flanders; and
that he was in decidedly close relations with the courts of Cham-
pagne, Blois, and France. But the whole matter still rests upon too
slender a basis of evidence to be at all satisfactory.2

FREDERICK A. G. COWPER
TRINITY COLLEGE
DURHAM, N.C.

1 Ille und Galeron von Walter von Arras, herausgegeben von Wendelin Foerster,
Halle, 1891, pp. xv-xvi.

2 The following errors occur in the report of the British Manuscripts Commission
and were reproduced by Professor Sheldon in his paper:

Page 388, verse 3. com, manuscript con. pens, no note necessary, MS reads pens.

"Our poem begins on folio 158 recto, etc." It actually begins on folio 157 recto
and ends on folio 187 verso.

Page 389. P. 6579 (W. 5790) a non. MS anor.

Page 390. 6* En vie, MS Envie. 18* me, MS m =m'en. 11*. 15*. and 22* MS
reads q = que.

Page 391. 25* MS reads liu.

POT and never pur is found in the manuscript wherever unabbreviated. M' It is
never written out, but is found once in rhyme with tolt, i.e., tout.

REVIEWS AND NOTICES

French Civilization from Its Origins to the Close of the Middle Ages.

By A. L. GUERARD. T. Fisher Unwin, 1920. Pp. 328.
Italian Social Customs in the Sixteenth Century and Their Influence

on the Literatures of Europe. By T. F. CRANE. Yale Press,

1920. Pp. xv+689.

French Classicism. By C. H. C. WRIGHT. Harvard University
Press, 1920. Pp. viii-f-177.

Synthetic history is in the air, and each of these three books offers the
reader a summary of a cultural movement connected with France. The
first and the third, as their titles show, deal with the two high points in
French civilization: the Middle Ages and the seventeenth century. Both
of them treat civilization as a background for literature, although it is per-
haps in the nature of the case that Mr. Gue'rard's concern is chiefly with
the background and Mr. Wright's with the literature. The second treatise
deals, according to its title, not with France but with Italy. At the same
time, the Italian social customs described had then* origin in medieval
France and attained their fruition, as Mr. Crane convincingly proves, in
the age of Louis XIV (see also the same author's La Societe fran$aise au
dix-septieme siecle). We need not be reminded that the French spirit is pre-
eminently "social," and that social games or customs have a direct bearing
on French literature. Ideally, then, the three volumes interlock, since
the subject-matter of the second furnishes a convenient link between the
French Middle Ages and French Classicism.

Of the three, Mr. Gue*rard's book is the most ambitious and, inci-
dentally, also the least satisfactory. Writing under the impact of modern
sociology, Mr Gue"rard makes a fitting distinction between civilization and
culture: "The essential element in civilization is usefulness [the control
over implements]; in culture, consciousness [the control over self]." The
two terms necessarily overlap, but they are not coextensive. "A man
enjoying without a thought the benefits of society is but a barbarian hi
modern clothing." On the other hand, "the sage whose needs are few,
whose practical knowledge is scant, but whose mind is capable of embracing
a vast purpose, is cultured in the highest sense of the term." Thus culture
is the dynamics of civilization; it is the synthetic, social force, which being
made conscious in a nation gives that nation unity and direction of expres-
sion. Mr. Gue"rard is correct in insisting on the cultural role of the French,
609] 153

154 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

while admitting, with unusual breadth of spirit, that if we speak of a French
civilization this is "nought but Western [European] civilization refracted
through the French milieu." It is this milieu during the Middle Ages
that he would reconstruct for us.

His treatise has two parts: Part I on the Origins (pp. 1-131) and
Part II on the Middle Ages proper (pp. 133-309). The student of literature
and the general reader, for whom Mr. Gue"rard affirms he is writing, naturally
look to Part I for a treatment of such topics as the topography of France,
the Celtic inhabitants of France, the Roman occupation, the Germanic
invasions, and the establishment of the empire of the Franks, as all of these
topics are essential to an understanding of the background upon which
medieval culture rests. Not content, however, with regarding these matters
as subsidiary, Mr. Gue"rard tends to exalt their importance and further
confuses the reader by delving into the eolithic, paleolithic, and neolithic
pre-history of man. Let us admit that the French are venerable, but cul-
turally little is gained by the assertion that "the history of French civiliza-
tion may be said to begin a thousand centuries ago, more or less" (p. 60).
As a matter of fact, French civilization as such began when Gaul, Roman,
and Teuton were sufficiently welded to constitute a new social order, and
as far as we can ascertain, this was not before the ninth century. It is
interesting, for example, to know that the prehistoric Cr6-Magnon race,
vestiges of which have been found in Dordogne, was presumably of a type
similar to "a group of French peasants" at present inhabiting the same
region, but the effect of such remote facts on Mr. Gue"rard's argument is
to deprive it of concentration: the author dwells too long on preliminaries,
some of them speculative in the extreme, and thus delays unnecessarily the
treatment of his main subject.

The result is that the book as a whole lacks proportion; Part II, in
particular, gives insufficient space to literary problems. Under the heading
"Christian Culture" (p. 187), only two and a half pages are given to
"Mediaeval Latin," a page and a half to "Sermons in Latin and French,"
and a scant five pages to the "Lives of Saints," the "Miracles of Notre
Dame," and the "Drama." Or, if we look for an account of the Old French
epic, we find it following an account of Villehardouin (whose work of course
presupposes the epic) in a chapter upon the "Life of the Fighting Caste,"
of which it occupies six pages out of a total fourteen. The sole literary
topic to have a chapter to itself is the "Romance of Chivalry" (p. 232),
yet this chapter includes, under the separate caption of "Aristocratic
Literature," Charles of Orleans (a writer of lyrics), Joinville and Froissart
(who are really historians), and the briefest possible mention of Aucassin
et Nicolete and of Petit, Jehan de Saintre. Nowhere is there an adequate
chronological record of the literary monuments emerging from their environ-
ment into the classic medieval forms of epic, romance, lai, fabliau, and
allegory, to say nothing of the rondeau, ballade, and epitre. While it is

610

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 155

true that Mr. Gue*rard's emphasis is on the social background, he is, to use
his own words, "providing that background for the study of literature,"
and where, we may ask, is there a richer source for this purpose than in
the literary documents themselves ?

As for matters of detail, there is space here to mention but a random
few. The Ligurians, rather than the Iberians (p. 69), it appears, were the
first ascertainable inhabitants of all Gaul. On the religion of the Gauls,
Mr. Gue*rard is wisely cautious; but it is known that originally Druidism
was not Gallic but Goedelic: Lucan, Pharsalia I, 454, mentions the alius
orbis, identical with the Irish mag meld (Plain of Delight), to which the
deceased Gauls were believed to go. The Gallic divinity Sirona (p. 77) is
more likely Dlvona, since Ausonius speaks of her as:

Divona Celtarum lingua fons addite divis.

Most historians agree that the invading Franks were not numerous (p. 127):
that they were "a mere handful" is however putting the case too strongly.
Mr. Guerard might have dwelt advantageously on the extent to which the
Teutons enriched the Gallo-Roman vocabulary. While granting that the
Germanic comitatus appears the determining factor, his fairness in dealing
with the origin of feudalism would have gained by adding that the word
beneficium was taken from Roman law. The half-page (p. 163) given to
the Order of Cluny is scarcely sufficient in view of the cultural importance
of this order in promoting the pilgrimages to Spain (see Be*dier, Ltgendes,
III, 90 ff.) and thus inspiring the chansons de geste. With respect to the
latter, it is, to say the least, misleading to speak of the Chanson de Roland
as having "little literary charm," or to maintain (p. 231) that "classical
stories and legends were retold in the prevailing form of the Chansons de
Geste." This is partly true only of the Alexander, the third form of which
is in twelve-syllable verse. A glance at any good handbook reveals the
fact that the pseudo-classical romance, as such, is a product of courtois, as
distinguished from Christian feudal society, and that the Romance of Eneas
is certainly earlier than 1175 (p. 231). As for that other courtois product,
the Arthurian romance, Geoffrey of Monmouth was not an Anglo-Norman
but a Welsh cleric (p. 235); Chretien of Troyes, not "the average sensual
man with a talent for polite literature," but a story-teller of distinction, an
astute psychologist, whose best pages Gaston Paris compares "aux plus
celSbres monologues de nos tragedies, aux pages les plus fouill&s de nos
romans contemporains." Chretien's grail is never "a vase" (p. 239) but a
dish or platter; we are not certain that Robert de Boron hailed from Franche-
Comte", and that he ever wrote a "trilogy" is an unsubstantiated hypothesis
and not a known fact.

On the other hand, if Mr. Guerard's work lacks proportion and occasional
accuracy of detail, it is well written, entertaining, and above all stimulating.
The political and institutional features of the book are among its best. The

611

156 RBVIEWS AND NOTICES

directing influence of the medieval church is ably depicted, just as it is
clearly shown how with the rise of bourgeois (urban) culture the Catholic
commonwealth disintegrates and the modern, nationalistic state takes its
place — a change with which Mr. Gue*rard is not altogether pleased. "The
feudal conception of property as a trust/' he thinks, "is more acceptable to
many progressive minds than the eighteenth-century doctrine of property as
an abstract, unlimited right." It is such an admirable echappee as this that
makes one regret doubly that Mr. Guerard's book is not more thoroughgoing.

By way of contrast, Mr. Crane's Social Customs is nothing if not
thorough. His 689 pages take a social device — that of polite debate through
question and answer — and trace it from the Old Provencal partimen or
joc-partit down to the various "conversations" andjeux de society of the late
Renaissance. As is to be expected from this veteran scholar, the method
and execution of his work are alike sound, and the wealth of bibliographical
detail is extraordinary. One might object that Mr. Crane takes little for
granted: he tends to give us the entire apparatus criticus rather than the
main argument capped with conclusions; Mr. Crane's style is not swift,
and most readers of the volume could spare the account of the lives of
Boccaccio, Leon Battista Alberti, and Marguerite d'Angouleme. By a
singular slip Mr. Crane alludes to Philippe de Novaire (Novara) as "Philippe
de Navarre" (p. 347 and index). Moreover, where completeness is an aim,
one wonders at finding no reference to Schevill's excellent treatise on Ovid
and the Renascence in Spain, Berkeley, 1913, especially as this work supple-
ments Mr. Crane's researches in a number of ways.1 Nevertheless, these
are minor matters, and scholarship is once more indebted to Professor Crane
for an interesting and illuminating treatise.

As is well known, courtois society made its first appearance in the south
of France about the twelfth century. Background and climate alike, sur-
vivals of Greek culture and the Christian feudal veneration of woman in a
glowing Provencal atmosphere, all this led to the establishment of the
social relations which we have come to regard as "polite." The Troubadour
lyric and the Old French romance are the earliest literary evidence of the
fact. Without following Mr. Crane into the remoter origins, we may note
that William IX, Count of Poitiers (1071-1127), is the first to mention the
love debate as a social diversion:

E srm partetz un juec d'amor

No suy tan fata
No'n sapcha triar lo melhor

D'entre'ls malvatz.

The oldest tenson is of about 1137, and of this lyric form the most popular
and widespread variety is the joc-partit. Among the numerous questions
propounded in it, several persist into later literature, while the "question"

1 See Schevill's chapter on the Ovidian tale in Italy, particularly his treatment of
Boccaccio. On neo-Platonism, Crane might also have cited Arnaldo della Torre, Storia
dell' Accademia Platonica di Fireme. As for Burckhardt, Kultur der Renaissance in
Italien (Crane, p. 164), this work appeared in a tenth edition, in 1908.

612

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 157

as a type is a continuous phenomenon throughout the periods Mr. Crane
discusses. A recurrent example, mentioned in Provencal, Italian, and
French literatures, is: Which person should a lover choose, a maid, a wife,
or a widow ? or, to cite one of the oldest, Which is preferable, the love of
a clerk or that of a knight (gentleman) ? The latter question occurs in the
early Concilium Amoris (Concile de Remiremont, end of the eleventh cen-
tury), and being adjudicated there by a female cardinal sent by the god
of love it naturally raises the problem of the so-called courts of love and
their actual existence in the Middle Ages. Wisely, Mr. Crane here joins
the ranks of the skeptics, although — again judiciously — he finds in the
important treatise of Andreas Capellanus evidence that such love decisions
were made only in the spirit of diversion, as an aristocratic pastime. Simi-
larly, the Portuguese Cancioneiro de Resende, containing the "most extensive
question in existence," whether silent sorrow (cuydar) or audible sighs
(sospirar) betray the deeper pain, is clearly the toying with an idea rather
than an attempt at a serious judgment actually pronounced. But it was
under the blue skies of Italy that the joc-partit or love debate, transplanted
from Provence, had its greatest elaboration. At the brilliant court of Naples,
about the middle of the fourteenth century, Boccaccio received the impulse
which has made his Filocolo and Decameron the repositories of "questions"
and "stories" turning upon the subject of love and social conduct generally.
"All the diversions," says Professor Crane, "of the most elegant society
since that day are found there — music and dancing and talk — what more
have we now?" And, as he might have added, these diversions were on a
more aesthetic plane than now.

Of the two works mentioned, the greater attention is given to the
Filocolo; first, because it defines the setting later developed in the Decameron;
and second, because the thirteen questions it contains are differentiated
according to the manner of earlier and later discussions. What follows the
Filocolo is essentially an adaptation of its method to the neo-Platonism of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and to the various books on courtesy and
manners in which the Renaissance is rich.

For their influence on France, the two outstanding books of this later
period are : Castiglione's Cortegiano (begun in 1508 but not published until
1528) and Guazzo's Civil Conversazione, or Polite Society (1574) . Castiglione,
idealizing the courtier against the setting of the court of Urbino, supplies,
by means of a debate, the elements which in the seventeenth century con-
stituted the French honnete homme. This fact is perhaps amply known;
but in connection with Mr. Crane's general argument it gains momentum.
As for Guazzo, his treatise, which deals first with the theory and then with
the practice of etiquette, was translated into French by both Chappuys
and Belleforest, and further inspired Sorel's La maison des jeux, Mile de
Scude*ry and precieux society in general, which was also indebted to Guazzo
for the idea of the Guirlande de Julie.1

i Borrowed from Guazzo's Ghirlanda della contessa Angela Bianco, Beccaria (1595).

613

158 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

Be it said in passing that Mr. Crane's treatment, which is chronological,
lists and discusses every important treatise from Francesco da Barberino's
Del Reggimento e Costumi di Donne to Harsdorfer's Frauenzimmer Ge-
sprdchspiele (1641) and Campillo de Bayle's Gustos y Disgustos del Lantiscar
de Cartagena (1689). The latest English reference is to an article on parlor
games in the Spectator, October 2, 1712.

If from all this material we selected an illustrative example, the most
significant would probably be Guazzo's reference (see Crane, p. 386) to the
question whether a solitary life is superior to a life of society. For this is
the problem of Moliere's Misanthrope. The seventeenth-century custom of
drawing portraits in speech and deducing maxims therefrom is virtually in
Guazzo; but what makes his Civil Conversazione of special interest for the
study of Moli£re is its account of the Game of Solitude. In this game
various characters are called upon to give reasons for seeking the solitude
of a "desert," and the first reason stated is that society contaminates the
soul. The analogy with Moliere's atrabilious Alceste is, of course, manifest.

Thus, the value of Mr. Crane's book is that it gives us the material
with which to reconstruct the social life of the Renaissance. In spite of its
great length, the treatise has the limitations of a sketch, but this is explained
by the boundless nature of the subject, a field hi which Mr. Crane has long
been a successful explorer.

On the other hand, Mr. Wright's book is not "an encyclopaedic survey"
but a restrained outline of that finished product: French classicism. Like
Mr. Gue"rard's, it is divided into two parts, here called respectively: Part I,
"The Foundations," and Part II, "The Structure." There are six chapters
to each part, and the whole constitutes an admirable Defense et Illustration
of the entire movement (political, social, and literary), nobly and simply
expressed. Mr. Wright likes classicism, and he likes it according to the
classical temper, with a sense of balance and distinction. When he tells us
that the French incline not to totality but to "intelligibility," he is sound,
and this soundness permeates his appraisal of the period. Altogether his
treatise is an indispensable aid to every serious student of seventeenth-
century culture and thought.

"In the seventeenth century," says Mr. Wright, "French civilization
reached, in letters as in politics, a harmony of organization." Not that
this principle affected all phases of society or any one phase inclusively,
since, from the material point of view, later ages were better organized.
Yet the guiding force of the age was "the harmonious interworking" of the
"component elements of French social and political life." This social and
political life was, of course, aristocratic or courtois. What distinguishes it
from the medieval past is its complete transfusion with the spirit of antiquity.

From the Ancients the Renaissance derived two essential momenta:
(1) the idea of the city as a cultural unit, "the citizen exercising his highest

614

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 159

function, tends towards a harmonious and well-regulated life of culture, in
which all of his faculties have full play"; and (2) the realization that art
and literature are the expression of beauty and vigor in a finite world:
classicism is the life of reason; it verifies ideas by facts; it seeks the general
in the particular; its universe is limited and controlled; it possesses no
striving for the unattainable, no emotional hinaus ins Freie, and therefore
no ethical or aesthetic disruption.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,
says Keats3 re-echoing the classical Boileau.

In treating the "foundations," Mr. Wright keeps these facts clearly in
mind. His second chapter on Platonists and Aristotelians is one of his best.
Had the concision of his work permitted a more historical treatment, it
would have been useful to explain how Platonism furnished the inspiration,
and Aristotelianism the control or form, of the French classical movement:
the Ple"iade and even Corneille being largely Platonic, and the grands clas-
siques prevailingly Aristotelian. As it is, Mr. Wright points out that both
Plato and Aristotle saw in beauty "the expression of the ideal in forms of
sense" but arrived at the goal by different methods, the one by deduction
from the world of ideas, the other by induction from the world of nature.
In either case, however, the factor of "reason" is fundamental, since it is
through reason that the Platonist reaches "true intuitions," and it is the
rational faculty in man which, according to Aristotle, works out Nature's
unfulfilled intentions. Thus, while there is "intuitive imagination in
classicism as well as in romanticism," it is superimposed on rationalism,
and classicism is primarily intellectual.

Coming to "the theories of the Pl&ade" (chap, iii) Mr. Wright shows
the Platonic strain in the Defense, especially the doctrine of assimilation
and innutrition so similar to the Platonic notions of methexis and anamnesis,
which Du Bellay, however, derived through Cicero, Horace, Quintilian, and,
we might add, Sperone Speroni and Trissino. The Ple"iade grafts numer-
ous elements, some of which are fairly incompatible, on the parent French
stock. Chief among these are Hellenism, Alexandrianism, the encyclopaedic
eagerness, and Italianism, especially Petrarchism. In a footnote (p. 40)
Mr. Wright says: "Ronsard saw in the poet a demi-god, Malherbe and
Boileau a man." No better distinction could be made. But although
the welter of Pl&ade striving was considerable, Mr. Wright's fourth chapter
appears somewhat to miss the native opulence of Ronsard's muse, his extraor-
dinary virtuosity, as well as the crystalline quality of Du Bellay's best
verse. While it is true also that French Renaissance tragedies "elaborate
a suffering supposedly tragic or atrox" such a designation is scarcely fair to
a type of tragedy of which King Lear is after all an illustration. Moreover,
the last two chapters in Part I dealing mainly with the transition to the
seventeenth century and the generation of 1660, are perhaps juster to the

615

160 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

lesser lights than to such pioneers as Montaigne, Malherbe, and Mme de
Rambouillet. Amyot receives but incidental reference; Montaigne's
relativism is stated, but scarcely his function in defining the province of
classicism: (1) in its identification of human traits, (2) in its amateur
spirit, and (3) in its acceptance of tradition as an ethical standard. Whether
it is right to say of so lyrical a genius as Pascal that he was " preoccupied
like Descartes with thought," is at least open to question. A reference to
Pascal's c'est sortir de I'humanite que de sortir du milieu (Pensees, 378) would,
if carried back to Montaigne where it originates, have given the reader a
better perspective than this section of the book permits.

As for Part II, the " structure" of classicism appears in the following
sections: characters and perso'ns ("characters and types" would have been
clearer), principles, and lastly genres: these are subdivided into the drama,
other poetical forms, prose forms, and art.

A word on each of these features. Louis XIV, as the presiding character
of the age, is shown in all his majesty and effulgence. Similarly, the honnete
homme, as the dominant type, is discussed with accuracy and discrimination.
Here Cteante's statement in Tartuffe:

Les hommes la plupart sont etrangement faits!
Dans le juste milieu on ne les voit jamais,

is used to advantage, although Mr. Wright is correct in quoting La Roche-
foucauld's celui qui ne se pique de rien as the best definition of the actual
type. Historically, he might have added, the urbanity of the type is related
to the Italian sprezzatura or aloofness, a trait of which Moilere's Don Juan
is an exaggeration.

As to principles, Mr. Wright justly emphasizes the Reason, since the
imitation of the Ancients was justified because they conformed with it.
Thus le bon sens is merely the practical reason, just as taste is reasoned art,
and le bel esprit, according to Bouhours, le bon sens qui brille. So, too,
nature is to the classicist primarily human nature; and if we transcend
the microcosm it is "a coherent system of laws expressive of the social
order and best exemplified in the life of civilized countries and their
capitals." In other words, classicism holds sway in urbe et orbe; the two
places are identified; turning to Malebranche, Mr. Wright would have found
that this writer promises the devout Christian a rationalized paradise like a
formal garden by Le N6tre.

In conformity with these principles, the classicist worked out the rules
of genre; these consisted of the drama and prose forms rather than of the
lyric and the epic, although the latter was the one "ignominious failure" of
the century. The steps whereby the law of verisimilitude becomes the
essence of the dramatic poem are carefully traced, and its bearing on Cor-
neille, Racine, and Moliere is adequately sketched. Possibly the treatment
of Corneille would have been clearer if Mr. Wright had dwelt on the dis-
tinction between the classical and preclassical periods: certainly, in dealing

616

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 161

with "admiration" as a dramatic emotion, he fails to note Corneille's
indebtedness to Minturno, and the fact that "admiration" is a necessary
feature of the romanesque (see the heroic novel) as it had been of the trium-
phant Italian Renaissance. Furthermore, Moliere's neglect of the rules is
appreciated, although it might have been stated that his treatment of charac-
ter, not as passion or incident but as elemental nature, tends to exceed the
classical formula. At the same time, it would be hard to find elsewhere as
good an appraisal of the Abbe* d'Aubignac's Pratique du thedtre, and of the
crisis-drama of Racine. In d'Aubignac, says Mr. Wright, "verisimilitude
amounts to conformity with the feelings of the spectators," and "these
must not be jarred, even at the cost of historical accuracy." In this way
the dramatic unities, that long incubation of Renaissance criticism, make
for the sublimated universality of the classical, literary ideal. As seen in
Racine, the dramatic apparatus is reduced to a minimum; "his tragedies
offer us a simple but impressive plot (pen d' incidents et pen de matiere)";
"by individual cases drawn from mythology or history are illustrated the
great truths of life, as valid now in the seventeenth century, as in the days
of Pyrrhus or of Nero." There is a striking analogy between such drama
and a "maxim " by La Rochefoucauld, or a "thought" by Pascal. Speaking
of his own Caracteres, La Bruyere said:

Je suis presque disposg a croire qu'il faut que mes peintures expriment bien
rhomme en ge"ne"ral, puisqu'elles ressemblent & tant de particuliers, et que
chacun y croit voir ceux de sa ville ou de sa province.

Further than this, literary classicism could not go. Fittingly, Mr. Wright's
book closes with an account of the "classical precepts" in the allied field of art.

WILLIAM A. NITZE
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Flaubert and Maupassant: A Literary Relationship. By AGNES
RUTHERFORD RIDDELL. Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1920. Pp. x+120.

Although the literary relationship of Flaubert and Maupassant has so
long been taken as a matter of course, it seems not previously to have
appealed to anyone as a subject for a doctoral dissertation. It goes without
saying that the subject well deserves the careful, detailed, thoroughly pains-
taking study that Miss Riddell has given it.

Her dissertation is divided into six chapters.

Chapter i sums up the known facts of the personal intimacy of Flaubert
and Maupassant and concludes that, since the work of the seven years of
apprenticeship has not been preserved, "we must seek for the literary influ-
ence then in considerable measure .... in the general application by the
latter, throughout his subsequent work, of the principles inculcated by the
former" (p. 9).

617

162 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

In chapter ii the author studies the theories of Flaubert and of Maupas-
sant regarding life. After noting many similarities in the circumstances of
their lives, she wisely recognizes the difficulty of distinguishing between
influence and mere correspondence (p. 12). Hence she seeks for "the
more concrete instances of similarity" (ibid.}. She finds that the critics
give her little help, but they generally agree that "such influence as exists is
observable chiefly in Maupassant's earlier work, before he had quite evolved
his own method" (ibid.). Since "he was not eminently inventive .... in
the acceptance of suggestions afterwards to be worked out in his own way,
we see possibilities for influence upon him" (pp. 13-14). Moreover, "the
two authors make definite statements regarding similar theories, beliefs, and
likes or dislikes" (p. 14), similarities which are summed up at the end of the
chapter as follows: "The environment of Flaubert and Maupassant tended
to give them a pessimistic outlook, which expresses itself in their contempt
for the world and for man, especially for the 'bourgeois/ Government,
religion, womankind, all come under their scorn. In the midst of the
general stupidity the literary man is a martyr for his cause. On the con-
trary, love of external nature furnishes to each the satisfaction which he
does not find in man" (p. 20).

In chapter iii Miss Riddell points out in the two authors similar
theories on literary procedure, but does not overlook differences, as well as
similarities, in practice.

Chapter iv studies "additional literary procedures employed by both
which, for the most part, they share in common with the other realists of
the day" (p. 38). We may readily accept Miss Riddell's sensible conclusion
that "it has not been intended .... to attribute to them more than the
weight of cumulative testimony when taken in conjunction with other evi-
dence presented for the relationship of Flaubert and Maupassant" (p. 62).

In chapter v the author finds many interesting similarities in "plot, inci-
dent, characterization, ideas, and wording" (p. 63). In commenting upon
similarities in description of details connected with death, Miss Riddell is
careful to observe: "Scrutiny, however, fails to reveal any distinctive like-
nesses, resemblances being confined to the universal circumstances and con-
comitants of this human experience" (p. 81). The author seems to us less
happy in her statement that "there are scattered here and there throughout
the works of Maupassant phrases which, while not corresponding definitely
to any particular phrases of Flaubert's, have yet a certain Flaubertian sug-
gestion" (p. 103). In this manner, after months of looking for similarities
in Flaubert and Maupassant, one may indeed go far, but it is a dangerous and
an unconvincing method which Miss Riddell herself fortunately is not much
given to following. We remember that she had previously stated her
intention of seeking for "the more concrete instances of similarity" (p. 12).

Chapter vi sums up the content of previous chapters and then con-
tinues to argue for the suggestive type of influence rather than for set imita-

618

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 163

tion. Miss Riddell says: " It seems as if the pupil, trained for years by the
master, and brooding, as he must have done, both during that period and in
subsequent days of remembrance, over the monuments of that master's
achievement, had absorbed so thoroughly the essentials of the latter's
thought and expression that he reproduced them almost unconsciously"
(pp. 109-10). This is a sane and balanced judgment which does the
author credit.1 Miss Riddell further shows that she has not lost her balance
when she says: "It goes without saying that a considerable portion of
Maupassant's work is, of course, distinctively his own" (p. 110). She
calls attention also to the influence of "their day and generation" upon
both, to the possible influence of Balzac, Zola, Daudet, and to "other
writers" who are, unfortunately, not named. Here Professor Olin H.
Moore might be of help with his article on "The Literary Relationships of
Guy de Maupassant," published before Miss Riddell's thesis, though written
later.2 Miss RiddelFs final conclusion is that "when all allowances have
been made, however, it yet remains true that Maupassant is the disciple of
Flaubert and owes to that master's influence much that is best in his own
work" (p. 110).

Miss Riddell's conclusions are moderate and sane. It is perhaps
rather surprising that, after mentioning that Maupassant's later work was
less influenced by Flaubert, she does not return to develop the idea in
detail. Should not just such a study as hers furnish the evidence needed,
if considered chronologically, to determine the truth or falsity of the gener-
ally accepted opinion ? It might be worth noting also that the very " unbook-
ishness" of Maupassant would seem to make him especially susceptible to
the word-of-mouth teaching of his friend.3 Maupassant himself tells us
that from Bouilhet and Flaubert he got persistency in literary effort, "la force
de toujours tenter."4 Finally, Miss Riddell's study serves to show that
Flaubert's influence helped Maupassant to learn, not merely how to write,
but even in many cases what to write, since from the former came many
characters and episodes as well as opinions and methods of literary pro-
cedure.

Some one, perhaps Miss Riddell herself, should now be able to tell us
with greater precision than before just how great is the originality of Maupas-
sant, the degree to which his genius is distinctive, for that it is distinctive
we can still hardly doubt.

GEORGE R. HAVENS

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

1 On this same page occurs a repetition of the argument criticized in our discussion
of chap, v, p. 103. The same criticism would apply here, but the argument seems not
to have led the author seriously astray.

2 Modern Philology, XV (1918), 645-62.

» Of course not all of Flaubert's teaching was by word of mouth.
* Maupassant, Le Roman (Pierre et Jean), p. 20.

619

164 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

El Diablo Cojuelo, Luis Velez de Guevara. Edicion y Notas de
FKANCISCO RODRIGUEZ Y MARIN. Madrid: Ediciones de "La
Lectura," 1918.

In this new and "popular" edition of El Diablo Cojuelo, Rodriguez
Marin has again demonstrated his extensive knowledge of Spanish tradi-
tion, folklore, and refranes. With few exceptions, all the difficult passages
have been explained in copious notes, to which more detailed reference will
be made later.

As compared with Bonilla y San Martin's last edition (1910), we may
note some improvements and some new material. In the prologo Rod-
riguez Marin has revised the biography of Guevara in the light of recent
discoveries. Much of what has hitherto been accepted, the letter of Gue-
vara's son in particular, is shown to be false. There is also a brief review
of Guevara's teatro and an appreciation of Velez by his contemporaries.
Some of the material is new, but a part is accredited to Cotarelo y Mori's
more extensive article along the same line. (See the Boletin de la Real
Academia, December, 1916, and April, 1917.)

The most interesting feature of the prologo, however, is the compilation
of a large number of references to the diablo cojuelo: we are made acquainted
with the diablo as he was known in popular song, folklore, and tradition
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In keeping with the expressed hope of placing El Diablo Cojuelo within
the reach of the public, Rodriguez Marin has modernized the spelling.
This would hardly be tolerated in any other kind of edition. In a few cases
the punctuation has been changed; the change always betters the reading
of the passage.

The chief value of the present edition lies in the notes. It is true that
Pe"rez y Gonzalez and Bonilla y San Martin had, in their previous editions,
discovered most of the difficulties and explained many of them, but this
does not detract from the value of Rodriguez Marin's work. All of the
notes are re-written, and a large part of the material is new; they contain
a wealth of detailed description that cannot be found elsewhere. A few
of the best may be cited: Rentoy, p. 68, 1. 6; plazuela de Herradores, 70, 4;
don extravagante, 72, 19; pastel de a cuarto, 78, 7; note on poets in general,
102, 8; rollo de Ecija, 157, 7. The historical notes on pp. 107 and 109 con-
tain material which would probably be inaccessible to one outside of Spain.
The notes on echar las habas (p. 209) and on andar el cedazo contain the
most detailed description of such practices that I have ever seen. The
note on page 251, line 14, clears up an obscure reference: the same is true of
the note on carril de pozo, page 258, line 13. Rodriguez Marin frequently
takes issue with Bonilla y San Martin. He is not always successful, as will be

620

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 165

seen by comparing their notes on boquita de rinon (Rodriguez Marin D 66
1. 16; Bonilla y San Martin, p. 245).

In addition to the copious notes Rodriguez Marfn has pointed out a
number of refranes and frases populares which Guevara had ingeniously
re-worked to suit his own purpose, thereby disguising them for the average
reader. For example, page 28, line 15, que camino del infierno, tanto anda el
cojo como el viento for camino de Santiago, etc.; 45, 15, Aca estamos todos; 48,
8, y como ha cobrado bwna fama, se ha echado a dormir, for cobra buenafama
y echate a dormir; 53, 1, y tredentas cosas mas; porque al fin de anos mil,
vuelven los nombres por donde solian ir, instead of al fin de anos mil, vuelven
las aguas por donde solian ir.

Another commendable feature of the present edition is the setting off
of the verse in its proper form: pages 84, 118, 133, 157 (here Bonilla also), 200.1

While on two occasions Rodriguez Marin frankly admits that he is
unable to explain certain passages (pp. 52, 1. 14; 90, 1), it will be seen that
this edition leaves little or nothing to be desired in the way of notes: there
are, however, many things lacking to make it a complete edition. In the
prdlogo Rodriguez Marin avoids a discussion of the date of composition;
he also fails to mention Le Sage's Le Diable Boiteux. Nor does he discuss
El Diablo Cojuelo. As yet this novel has not been assigned to any definite
category: it certainly cannot be classified as a picaresque novel, nor can
it be called a novela de costumbres. It partakes of the nature of both, and
these two parts are distinct. Through tranco IV, with the exception of
one picaresque adventure, we have a series of cuadros de costumbres. Part
two, beginning with tranco V, is almost entirely picaresque. No explana-
tion of the long list of nobles in tranco VIII is made. It is evident of course
that many of them were mentioned merely because they were at court,
but it is also certain that Velez had closer connection with some of them.
This is a piece of work that must be done in Spain.

The sources of the Diablo Cojuelo are but lightly touched upon. There
is, first, the Lucianesque influence to which Guevara himself calls attention
in the first tranco: the dialogue which he had in mind is Icaro-Menippus.
In this dialogue Menippus relates how he had been able to fashion wings
and take flight to the ethereal regions. While resting on the moon he
was able to see all that passed on the earth. Still another of the dialogues,
The Dream, is promising as source material. Simyllus is acquainted with
the charm in the long feather of a cock's tail. Armed with this he opens
the doors of his neighbors' houses and, invisible, sees all that is passing within.
Other passages which have a Lucianesque flavor are page 49, lines 12-13, and
tranco VI, where Don Cleofas and the cojuelo are resting under the stars.
Don Cleofas asks his companion to relate what he saw during his fall from

i The following typographical errors are to be noted: the reference to note 205, 1. 23,
should be 205, 13; 205, 26, should be 205. 17.

621

166 RBVIEWS AND NOTICES

heaven. The same question is asked of Menippus, and the answer is sub-
stantially the same as the one given by the cojuelo.

Quevedo's influence is far greater. Generally, it may be said that
there are few characters satirized in El Diablo Cojuelo for which a parallel
may not be found in either the Suenos of Quevedo or in some of his verses.

A careful analysis will show that the theme of the first four francos of
El Diablo Cojuelo is similar to that of Quevedo's El Mundo por de Dentro.
This Sueno is the only one which has a continuous thread: the same charac-
ters continue throughout. Quevedo is guided along the Calls Mayor of
the world, which is Hypocrisy. This is exactly what happens to Don Cleofas
in El Diablo Cojuelo, where we have a more detailed description of this
same street. The calle de gestos, casa de locos, pila de dones, and ancestral
wardrobe described by Guevara are but the fruit of hypocrisy. Rodri-
guez Marin has pointed out (p. 229, 1. 1) that the funeral described by
Guevara in franco VIII is similar to that described by Quevedo in El Mundo
por de Dentro. The following are a few of the many passages in El Diablo
Cojuelo which may have been suggested by Quevedo. The escape of the
cojuelo from the flask recalls a passage in Zahurdas de Pinion (Biblioteca
de Autores espanoles, 3106). The opening lines of franco II, Quedo don Cleofas
absorto en aquella pepitoria humana, de tanta diversidad de manos, pies y
cabezas, recall Quevedo's description of Madrid:

De ese famoso lugar,

Que es pepitoria del mundo,

En donde pies y cabezas

Todo esta revuelto y junto [B.A.E., t. Ixix, pdg., 2096]

Again, in franco VII, Guevara's description of Fortuna and her train is
undoubtedly inspired by Quevedo's Romance upon the same subject
(B.A.E., t. Ixix, pag. 2046). Guevara's premdticas, in franco X, are similar
to those which Quevedo gives in El Buscon, chapter x. The cojuelo's account
of his visit to Constantinople and his return through Italy, touching in
Venice, Naples, Genoa, Florence, and parts of Germany, is but a concise
paraphrase of Quevedo's treatment of the conditions in these cities. See
La Hora de Todos, etc., Nos. 35, 33, 32, 34. The order is the same, though
inverse, for the cojuelo made his visits while returning to Spain.

Finally, I would suggest the following as an addition to the note on
the cuba de Sahagun: Lopez de Ubeda in La Picara Justina (1605) tells
us that this well-known and most ancient vat was located at Sahagun, a
town in the province of Leon, famous for a Benedictine monastery dating
back to the ninth century and restored in the eleventh. Hence Guevara's
allusion "y no profeso." The name Sahagun is in reality derived from San
Facundo.

E. R. SIMS

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 167

A Short Italian Dictionary. By ALFRED HOARE. Cambridge: The
University Press; and New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Vol. I,
Italian-English, 1918, pp. xxviii+443. Vol. II, English-Italian^
1919, pp. vi+294.

Mr. Hoare's large and costly Italian Dictionary was reviewed in Modern
Philology, XIV, 429-30. Its use as a reference work for some three years
has yielded abundant proof of its thoroughness, its accuracy, and its general
excellence.

The need of a cheaper edition has now been met; the dictionary thus
becomes much more accessible to teachers and to students.

The first volume is an abridgment of the Italian-English part of the
quarto edition; but the loss of material is not so large as one might expect.
Some forty thousand words are treated, as against some fifty thousand in the
original edition. Space is saved by the omission of the words least impor-
tant from the point of view of the average user of the dictionary, by the
shortening of definitions, by the omission of etymologies, and by the plan of
grouping within a single paragraph words built upon a single unvarying stem.

The introductory pages on the conjugation of Italian verbs constitute
an unnecessary duplication of material available in ordinary Italian gram-
mars, and are open to adverse criticism in several points of detail.

The second volume is an expansion of the English-Italian part of the
quarto edition. It contains some thirty thousand words — five thousand or
so more than the earlier form. It is then the most comprehensive as well
as the best English-Italian dictionary in existence. Its value would have
been increased had the diacritic indications of pronunciation been used for
all Italian words instead of being limited to proper nouns and adjectives.

This volume, like the other, is laudably generous in the treatment of
idiomatic phrases. Here one may learn how to say in Italian, "The Daily
Mail has a circulation of .... copies," or "Tips are often quite a serious
item in a young man's expenditures," or "Cambridge won the toss and chose
the Surrey side"; or that to catch out is "Al giuoco di cricket, prender una
palla fatta salire in aria dal batsman prima che cada in terra, terminando
cosi 1'innings di questo." But baseball is only "un certo giuoco americano."

ERNEST H. WILKINS
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

A Classical Technology. Edited from Codex Lucensis 490 by
JOHN M. BURNHAM, Professor of Latin, University of Cincin-
nati. Boston: Richard S. Badger, the Gorham Press, 1920.
The Classical Technology is a collection of recipes for making colors,
inks, varnishes, and compounds of various sorts. It is the second work by
our author in this field, the first, Recipes from Codex Matritensis A 16,

623

168

REyiEws AND NOTICES

having appeared in the "University of Cincinnati Studies" in 1912. These
recipes, according to Professor Burnham, originated in Alexandria about
300 A.D. They were brought to Italy and translated into Low Latin about
650 or possibly earlier. The Lucca MS was written at the close of the
eighth century in various scripts (among them apparently the Visigothic).
The scribe of the pages containing the recipes must have been an Italian.
The immediate archetype of the Lucensis was Spanish; this is proved by
various paleographical symptoms as well as by certain linguistic peculiarities
in the text. Burnham assumes the year 725 as the approximate date of
this Spanish MS.

The editor prints an exact transcript of the text, preserving the spelling,
punctuation, word-separation (or lack of it) of the MS; only the abbrevia-
tions are expanded. In a brief commentary (pp. 77-180) some special
points are discussed. A translation of the text follows (pp. 81-188) ; this
must have given the editor as much trouble as the constitution of the text:
bad Latin on bad Greek does not make for clearness. A Glossary (pp.
138-166) contains a list of new or rare words or meanings and unusual
constructions. The editor notes about ninety words not found in our
dictionaries and about forty words that are starred in the Romance dic-
tionaries of Korting and Meyer-Liibke. Pages 166-70 are devoted to a
discussion of the lexicography and syntax of the translation.

Both Latinists and Romance scholars should be grateful to Professor
Burnham for this excellent work. It was especially desirable that a difficult
MS like the Lucensis be edited by a trained paleographer.

CHARLES H. BEESON
UNIVERSITY OP CHICAGO

Modern Philology

VOLUME XVIII April IQ2I NUMBER 12

THE EPILOG OF CHAUCER'S TROILUS

The last twelve stanzas of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde owe
little to the main source of the poem, and form a diffused Epilog
or envoi, mingled with the completion of the story. This alterna-
tion impresses one as due, not to a series of afterthoughts, but
rather to a spontaneity of style, a lingering unwillingness to make
an end of the work which he had written with such strong interest,
or an artful heed to emotional effect.1 For a combination of grandeur
and charm the ending is seldom matched in poetry. (1) "Go little
book," he says in adieu, and exhorts his work to do homage to its
poetic masters (V, 11. 1786-92). (2) He prays that its text and

, . -. jvU

verse be not corrupted (11. 1793-99). (3) He narrates Troilus' *
death and ascent to heaven (11. 1800-34). (4) He exhorts the
young to turn their hearts from worldly vanities to love of God,
and contrasts Christian truth with pagan illusions (11. 183&-55; cf.
1. 1825). (5) He directs his book to Gower and Strode, and asks
for their corrections (11. 1856-59). (6) He ends in an imposing and
devotional invocation to the Trinity (11. 1860-69).

The second of these parts expresses the misgiving of the careful
workman when his fancy darts ahead and pictures the obliteration
of finer touches by heedless scribes and ignorant readers; one of the

1 The preceding two stanzas as well, on Criseyde's and others' treason to love, are
general in application, and might be called part of the Epilog, and help account for its
curious arrangement. In them he draws a worldly conclusion; then after dismissing
his book and rounding off the story, he ends hi a loftier vein. He did not wish to pass
directly from a prudential caution against rakes to a devout transcending of all earthly
love. See note on p. 626.

113 [MODEEN PHILOLOGY, April, 1921

114 JOHN S. P. TATLOCK

earliest expressions in English of the self-consciousness of literary
art.1 The third is based partly on the ending of Boccaccio's Filos-
trato, the main source of the whole poem, but (as is well known)
chiefly on his Teseide, XI, 1-3.2 In the sixth and last, Chaucer
holds to the frequent medieval practice, which Boccaccio abandoned,

1 This is the earliest tune in his works that Chaucer expresses this solicitude. That
his fears were often enough realized we see in the Words to Adam; also in K.T., 2062-64
(compared with T.C., III, 726), and Pard. T., 585. Cf. the writer's Scene of the Frankl.
T. Visited (Chaucer Soc., 1914, p. 36). His fear of miswriting and of mismetering for
default of tongue he says is due to the great diversity in English and in the writing of
it. He is probably thinking both of general dialectical differences, and of the increas-
ingly recessive accent in French dissyllables and especially the growing disregard of
the final -e, which had begun in the north and was becoming so common in his day
that soon after his death his usage was hardly understood. This misunderstanding
accounts for Dryden's patronizing manner in speaking of Chaucer's verse in the Preface
to the Fables. Perhaps there is an indication in the passage that Chaucer admits what
the modern student recognizes, his somewhat arbitrary practice as to the pronunciation
of final -e. Cf . note on p. 641 below for another possible reason for the passage, especially

II. 1797-98. The fact is now generally recognized that Chaucer had it in mind that
the poem was to be read aloud by himself and others; cf. I, 32-33, 450; II, 30, 917;

III, 495, 499, 1330 ff.; IV, 799-803; V, 1032, 1796-97. In V, 270, however, he addresses
the "redere." His constant pretense in T.C. (I, 15 ff., 436; II, 19-21; III, 1319-20,
1333) and elsewhere (H.F., 248, 628, 667-68; L.G. W., 1167; P.P., 8-11, etc.), of personal
inexperience in love may be meant to avert chaff from himself in a circle of friends to
whom he was reading. He not only omits but deliberately reverses Boccaccio's personal
love confession, as is noted by Professor Kittredge ("Chaucer's Lollius," Harvard Studies
in Classical Philology, XXVIII, 66-67). Various requests more or less like Chaucer's
may be recalled elsewhere, such as Orm's instructions for careful copying in the dedica-
tion of his alleged poem. Professor C. G. Allen has shown me a particularly curious
parallel in the "Prdlogo general que & sus obras puso Don Juan Manuel" in the early
fourteenth century; see Biblioteca de Autores Espanoles, LI (Madrid, I860), 233-34.
Don Juan laments the errors of copyists, states that he has collected his works hitherto
written into one standard copy (cf. Alfred's Preface to the Cura Pastoralis), and asks
readers not to blame him for anything before they have consulted this:

Et recelando yo, don Johan, que por razon que non se podrS, excusar que los libros
que yo he fechos non se hayan de trasladar muchas veces, et porque yo he visto que en
los traslados acaesce muchas veces, lo uno por desentendimiento de escribano, 6 porque
las letras semejan unas & otras, que en trasladando el libro ponen una razon por otra,
en guisa que muda toda la entencion et toda la suma, et sea traido el que la flzo, non
habiendo y[o] culpa; et por guardar esto cuanto yo pudiere, flee facer este volumen en

que estan escriptos todos los libros que yo fasta aqui he fechos Et ruego a

todos los que leyeren cualquier de los libros que yo flz, que, si fallaren alguna razon
mal dicha, que non pongan a mi la culpa fasta que vean este volumen que yo mesmo
concert^.

At the end of St. Anselm's Preface to his Monologion he requests the copyist to
be sure to put the Preface first, that what follows may be better understood. At the
end of the Old Irish Tdin b6 Cualgne (ed. by Windisch, p. 911) blessings are invoked
on those who leave the text unaltered. The most venerable instance is the warning
against addition or diminution in the Book of Revelations (xxii, 18, 19).

2 The passage from the Teseide, lacking in some MSS, was put in by Chaucer after
the poem had been a while in circulation. So he increased the broken effect of the
ending by adding this bit of narrative, without which it would have been an almost
purely lyrical envoi. But he did so with good reason. Some have thought the account
of Troilus' flight to heaven frigid, especially after the warmth of the rest of the poem.
But its otherworldly tone is meant to lead into the unworldly ending which follows;
piety with a pagan touch forms a transition from pagan worldliness to Christian devout-
ness. It was probably to avoid too abrupt a shift from sympathy to detachment that
the four stanzas intervene between the last preceding mention of Troilus, and the account
of his death and the slurs on worldly love. Compare my first note. Professor R. K.
Root (Textual Tradition of Chaucer's Troilus, Ch. Soc., 1916, pp. 245-48) shows no other
considerable variant hereabout except in 11. 1866-67 ("Trine vnite vs from oure cruel
foone Defende," in MSS Harl. 3943 and Rawl.). This whole passage in the Teseide

i seems not to have been recognized as a reminiscence of the Paradiso, XXII, 100-154,
j where Dante rises from the seventh to the eighth sphere, views the planets circling
• beneath him, and smiles at the vile semblance of our earth.

626

THE EPILOG OF CHAUQER'S "TROILUS" 115

, f'/X/raW7

of a religious ending.1-' But Chaucer is in no sense following a
mere convention, and there was a special reason for the thing
here (on which more hereafter). The purpose of the present article
is to consider what usage he was following, or what he had in mind,
in the first, fourth, and fifth parts.

The "Go little book" ejyw has had a long history. Like so
much else, it can be traced to Ovid. For years long Ovid had
been chafing against his lot at Tomi; such interest as there may
have been in a frontier town, like a modern Manchurian frontier
town, did not appeal in the least to an elderly man used to metro-
politan society. Many a day he saw the courier start toward gelid
Thrace, cloud-covered Haemus and the waters of the Ionian Sea
with dispatches for The City (Ex Ponto iv. 5). Now and again he
would send by the courier to Rome some Ballad of Reading Gaol,
and would address the lucky "Little Book" without grudging its
good fortune but not without bitter envy :

Parve — nee invideo — sine me, liber, ibis in urbem:
Ei mihi, quod domino non licet ire tuo!
Vade, sed incultus, qualem decet exulis esse.

Vade, liber, verbisque meis loca grata saluta.

I tamen et pro me tu, cui licet, aspice Romam!

[Tristia i. 1. 1-3, 15, 57].

Vade salutatum, subito perarata, Perillam,
Littera, sermonis fida ministra mei! [iii. 7].

Ite, leves elegi, doctas ad consulis aures,

Verbaque honorato ferte legenda viro

[Ex Ponto iv. 5].'

i LI. 1863-65 were shown by Gary to be borrowed from Paradiao, XIV, 28-30.
Cf. also Purgatorio, XI, 2; Boccaccio's Filostrato, II, 41, and his De Gen. Deorum, XV,
9 ([eighth ed.; Basle, 1532], p. 394, God omnia intra se continentem, et a nullo con-
tentum). On the origin of the Dante passages see the writer's article in Romanic .

Review, X, 274 ft. A religious ending is especially common in earlier and less sophisti-
cated works and those adapted to oral delivery. Therefore it seems commoner in English
than in French. It was revived in the sophisticated and unspontaneous English litera-
ture of the fifteenth century. Most of the Canterbury Tales have some sort of pious
ending, which carries out their oral and generally popular character. Without a specii
reason for its presence, one would not have expected the religious ending in such a poem
as T.C. Such of Chaucer's other longish secular works as are finished have none (B.D.,
Mars, P.P.).

* See also Tristia ii. 1, "Quid mihi vobiscum est, infelix cura, libelli?" He often
personifies his book, or represents it as speaking (e.g.. Ex Ponto ii. 7; Tristia iii. 1,
In Amores ii. 15, he tells a ring to go, envies its good fortune etc. The Tristia and
Pontic Epistles of course were perfectly well known in the Middle Ages. Here and
below I make no claim to tracing the complete history of the usage.

627

116 JOHN S. P. TATLOCK

In addressing his book Ovid perhaps followed the example of Horace
(Epistles i. 20. 1), Vertumnum lanumque, liber, spectare videris.1
But no one who reads the poems can think Ovid following a mere
convention or using an artifice. His interest is fixed on his book's
destination, and he shows his hope that it may get him called back.
This "Go Little Book" conceit, fanciful, confidential, and
quaint, originating thus it would seem in the regrets of the exile,
has passed on down to our own time. It is repeatedly adopted
from Ovid2 by Martial in his Epigrams.

Argiletanas mavis habitare tabernas,

Cum tibi, parve liber, scrinia nostra vacent.

I, fuge; sed poteras tutior esse domi [i. 3J.

Vade salutatum pro me, liber: ire iuberis
Ad Proculi nitidos, officiose, lares [i. 70].

Romam vade, liber .... [iii. 4],

Vis commendari sine me cursurus in urbem,
Parve liber, multis, an satis unus erit? [iii.5}.3

Statius bids a letter (Silvae iv. 4) : " Curre per Euboicos non segnis,
epistola, campos"; then tells it what to say. An epigram in the
Greek anthology (xii. 208)4 imitates the first poem in Ovid's Tristia:

Evrv^es, ov <£0ove'a>, /fySAi'oW ....
Xapraptov, Seo/xat, irvKvorepov TL \dXei.

Since Ovid was pre-eminently the poet of love for the Middle Ages,

1 There is a certain likeness in the sudden order to a servant at the end of a poem —
I, puer, atque meo citus haec subscribe libello (Horace Sat. i. 10. 100).

I, puer, et citus haec aliqua propone columna (Propertius Eleg. iii. 23. 23).

2 On the general and this particular influence of Ovid on Martial see Zingerle,
Martial's Ovid-Studien (Innsbruck, 1877), pp. 1 flf., 27; H. M. Stephenson, Selected
Epigrams of Martial (London, 1907), p. 181.

"See alsoii. 1; iii. 2; iv. 86, 89; vii. 97; viii. 72; x. 104; xii. 3 (P. G. Schneidewin,
Leipzig, 1881). Martial was unfamiliar in the Middle Ages, but was known to both
Petrarch and Boccaccio; see Grandgent, Dante (New York, 1916), p. 238, and Sandys,
Hist. Class. Scholarship (Cambridge, 1903-8), II, 6, 13. There is no evidence that
Chaucer knew him.

4 Loeb Classical Library edition. Statius ends his Thebaid with an address to it,
"O Thebai" (xii. 811-16), "Vive, precor; nee tu divinam Aeneida tempta." Joseph
of Exeter in the twelfth century, among whose chief models were Statius and Ovid,
dismisses his De bello Trojano with (vi. 961) "Vive, liber, liberque vige."

628

THE EPILOG OF CHAUCER'S "TROILUS" 117

we may see his influence in the address to the poem in the envoi of
the courtly or love lyric in Provengal:

Chanzos, tirt n' iras outra mar.
Chanso, vai t' en a mon Plus-Avinen.1

By Proven$al influence we often find the conceit in Old French
chansons and other lyrics.

Chansonete, querre ire's
La millor de la centred.

Changonete, tu iras

A mon ami, si li di . . . .2

It appears constantly in early and later Italian, especially in canzoni:
Canzonetta novella
Va, e canta nuova cosa.

Vanne a Tolosa, ballatetta mia.3

The address to the poem, "Canzon mia," etc., appears constantly
in the envois to the canzoni and other lyrics of Dante4 and Petrarch,6
often with the "Go" in the former, rarely in the latter. It is an
even more striking usage of Boccaccio, who probably followed the
example of Ovid as well as of medieval poets. He not only uses
it at the end of canzoni and ballate* but also at the end of long poems,

i Appel, Provenzalische Chrestomathie (Leipzig, 1912), pp. 63, 69. See also, e.g ,
Chansons de Guillaume IX. (ed. Jeanroy; Paris, 1913), p. 5. I owe several references
to Drs. Johnston and Foster.

*By Gillebert de Berneville, in Scheler's Trouveres beiges du Xlle au XI Ve siecle
(Brussels, 1876), I, 77, 121. See also ibid., I, 83, 104, 106, 124, 136, 149; II, 101, 105, in
poems by the above, Mathieu de Grand, and others; Paul Meyer, Bibl. de I' £ cole de»
Charles, 6 s6rie, III, 149, 158; Les plus anciens chansonniers fransais ([ed. Brakelmann]
Ausg. u. Abh., XCIV, 4, 25, 40-53, etc., including a sirventes by Richard I of England);
Ausg. u. Abh., XCVIII, 40, 100, and passim; Gesellschaft fUr rom. Litt., V, 142, 145. It
is not a usage of the French lyrists whom Chaucer was most familiar with. The address
to the " Little Book" is fitting in the classical instances, coming at the beginning (usually)
or end of a single lyric or small volume of lyrics. In the medieval cases it comes at the
end of a work, sometimes a long one. The diminutive, though often modest, betrays
the classical origin of the conceit.

8 By Jacopo da Lentino and Guido Cavalcanti (thirteenth century), in D'Ancona
and Bacci's Manvale (I, 61, 115). See also D'Ancona and Comparetti, Antiche Rime
Volgari, I, xxxviii ; also Scelta di Curiosita, CLXXXV, 55, 63, 64.

4 Vita Nuota, Ballata 1, canzoni 1 and 3; Convivio, canzoni 1-3; Canzoniere. Sestina
2, canzoni 9-12, 14-18, 20, 21.

" Edition of Dresden, 1774; Part I, Canzoni 1, 2, 4-6, 8-10, 12, 15-18, 20, 21;
Part II, Canzoni 1, 3-5, and p. 428.

« Maghori-Moutier edition, XVI, 107, 110, 114, 121, 125, 129; and Decam., IV,
10, end.

118

J«HN S. P. TATLOCK

where it may be regarded as a short lyric closing a long narrative.1
Thou, "o libro," he tells the Teseide (XII, 84), art the first to treat
such a subject in the vulgar tongue, but shalt come perchance
among poems of the older sort. " Canzon mia pietosa," he addresses
the Filostrato (IX, 1), . . . . "te n' andrai Alia donna gentil della
mia mente" (stanza 5); "or va" (stanza 8). He adopted it also
at the end of his long prose works in Latin and Italian. At the
end of certain of them he uses the diminutive, presumably out of
modesty; "O picciolo mio libretto .... dinanzi dalle innamo-
rate donne ti presenta . . . . Va adunque" (Fiammetta, chap. 9);2
"Piccola mia operetta" (Corbaccio, end);3 "0 piccolo mio libretto,"
he apostrophizes the Filocolo* He bids farewell to his De Casibus
Virorum Illustrium — "Tu autem parve liber longum vive."5

Chaucer therefore in beginning his envoi "Go, litel book, go litel
myn tregedie" was following a long and widespread tradition, as
regards the address, the "go"6 and the "litel"; a tradition which
conveyed all the charm of modesty and of literary reminiscence,
especially from Ovid. Boccaccio's usage was probably most in his
mind, though not especially the ending of the Filostrato.7 Nowhere
before Boccaccio do I find the "little book" conceit at the end of a
long work.8

1 This lyric development is characteristic of this most original of writers; see note
on p. 638 below.

2 Ibid., VI, 199, 200. The passage contains plain imitation of Ovid's Tristia i. 1
(and of Dante's Inferno, XX, 21).

» V, 255.

« viii. 376. There is much resemblance between the ending of this work and that
of the Troilus, but the former lacks the request for correction (see later) found in the
latter and in other works of Boccaccio. We may well see the influence of various of
his works on the ending of the Troilus.

5 Ed. Augsburg (1544), p. 273.

6 In Chaucer the "go" is a mere farewell, without telling the book where to go.
Elsewhere it is not a farewell but a direction.

7 Troilus apostrophizes his first letter to Criseyde (II, 1091-92) :

Lettre, a blisful destenee
Thee shapen is, my lady shal thee see.

Very likely spontaneous, but it recalls the Latin poets, and the envoi of the Filostrato
(IX, 5), congratulating the poem because it is to see his lady:
O te felice, che la vederai.

8 It is needless to follow the usage through later English poetry and prose, where
it may be attributed more or less to the influence of the Troilus passage. Lydgate uses
it over and over again (see Schick, Lydgate' s Temple of Glas [E.E.T.S., 1391], p. 122);
also Hoccleve (Regement of Princes, end, Tale of Jonathas, end, Balade to the Duke of
York, 1. 1); Caxton (Book of Curtesye, end [E.E.T.S.]; Hist, of Reynard the fox, end, ed.

630

THE EPILOG OF CHAUCER'S "TROILUS" 119

The fifth part of the Epilog follows a less common usage. Medie-
val writers occasionally ask for criticism, or correction (the usual
word), from the person to whom a work is addressed or from the

by Goldsmid, II, 120); Skelton, James I of Scotland, Hawes, etc. (Schlck, op. cit.). In
Lydgate's Black Knight this form of envoi is found, as seldom, combined with the ballade
form, " Princes . . . ." See also the end of the Wallace (Sc. Text Soc., XI, 1451, 1453) and
various poems in Vol. VII of Skeafs Oxford Chaucer. It is used by Spenser in the

Epithalamion ("Song "), and by Bunyan in the poem preceding Part II of Pilgrim' »

Progress. When one finds it in Bill Nye it is time to stop. Two other matters in this
stanza of the Epilog are worthy of note. Chaucer exhorts his book to kiss the steps of
Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan, and Statius. Whether he is thinking especially of authors
used in this poem (so Skeat), or, as is more likely, of the antique sages of Inferno, IV.
82-102 (M.L.N., XXIX, 97), or of the ending of Boccaccio's Filocolo (Young, Story of
T. and C., 178-79, but cf. also Teseide, XII, 85), his list of ancient writers is pretty much
the common one; see H.F., 1455 fl.; Boccaccio's AmorosaVisione, V, 7ff.; E. Moore,
Studies in Dante, I, 6; Anglia, XIV, 237; Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, p. 79
(Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Horace, Juvenal, Statius always recognized as the chief poets).
Secondly, as to —

No making thou n' envye,

But subgit be to alle poesye.

Chaucer always makes a clear distinction between "poete," "poetical," "poesye,"
"poetrye" on the one hand, and on the other "makere," "makying," "make." As
applied to poetry the two sets of words seem about coeval in English, both hardly ante-
dating the fourteenth century. The reference is to classical poetry with the word
"poete" in B.D., 54, Boethius, I, m. 1, III, p. 12, m. 12; H.F., 1483, 1499,-MeJ., 2686 prob-
ably, Merch. T., 1732; "poetical" in Boethius, I, p. 1; "poetrye" in T.C.V., 1855; H.F.
1001, 1478, Sq.T., 206. When he disclaims figures of poetry and art poetical in H.F.,
858 and 1095, and bids the Troilus be subject to "alle poesye" (V, 1790), he refers to
Latin poets and their usages. "The forme of olde clerkes speche in poetrye" which he
says is to be found in the Troilus (V, 1854-55) refers not to Boccaccio but to real or
fictitious classical models. "Poete" is used of Dante in Monk's T., 3650 and W.B.T.,
1125, and "poete" and "poetrye" of Petrarch in Cl. Prol., 31, 33. Of his own poetry
he uses "make" and "makying" (Adam, 4; T.C.V., 1788; L.G.W., B-Prol., 188,
413, 538, 573, 579, 614, 618,929,2136); also of other vernacular love poetry (L.O.W..
B-Prol., 69, 74, Venus, 82, and cf. R. R., 41). When he bids the Troilus envy no making but
be subject to all poesy (V, 1789-90), he does not use the terms as synonyms, but says in
effect, "Envy not your peers and submit yourself to your betters." For all that, if
he would have accepted the word poetry for any of his own works, it would have been
for the Troilus; he would certainly have felt it to be on a loftier plane (though not
necessarily better) than anything else he ever wrote. There are indications that at
this time he had been making a particular study of the traditional art of poetry. As
to the nature of the distinction, it is not so much that he uses "makying," etc., of ver-
nacular verse, and "poetrye," etc., of Latin. The latter refers to the loftier, more
imaginative, and really or supposedly symbolical literature which is of course mostly
in verse, and which to the Middle Ages is nearly all in Latin, the Divine Comedy being
the chief exception. Lydgate (Troy Book, II, 5934) uses "poysie" in the same manner.
Just so, careful writers today use " verse" for what does not deserve to be called " poetry ";
we are still maintaining the dignity of that word. The sense of esoteric sacredness attach-
ing to poetry is well illustrated by Hauvette (Boccace, p. 455). The conception of poetry
as in essence symbolical of general truth runs through the last two books of Boccaccio's
De Genealogia Deorum, and of course was common in early and late Renascence writers.
It is well illustrated in a letter by Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406): "hie loquendi modus
poeticus est, falsitatem corticitus pre se ferens, intrinsecus vero latentem continens
veritatem. huius rei peritia, doctrina sive ratio poesis dicitur, poetica vel poetria"
(Epistolario di C.S., ed. by F. Novati, Istituto Storico Italiano [Rome, 1905], IV, 177) . The
idea contributed greatly to the veneration for the higher poetry, and was a strong shield
against its enemies; see pp. 650 ff. below. As to Chaucer's practice, again, he gives the

120 J»HN S. P. TATLOCK

general reader.1 Without of course claiming completeness or
tracing origins, we may note the following cases. One "B," who
wrote, about the year 1000, the earliest existing life of St. Dunstan,
in words which it would be a pity not to give literally, asks Arch-
bishop Elfric of Canterbury to have scratched or emended with a
lamenting little pen of gushing ink whatever offends against the
norm of orthography; also the sagacious of both sexes to do the like.2

high title to Petrarch, doubtless for his Latin poetry and possibly his Ciceronian prose,
but not for his love poetry; out of modesty Petrarch disclaims the word Poeta for himself
(Invect. contra Medicum, Book I, p. 1205 [Basle, 1554]). Dante is the sole vernacular
poet to whom Chaucer gives it. In so ranking these two he follows the frequent example of
Boccaccio (De Gen. Deor., XIV, 10, 11, 19, 22; XV. 6; note, by the way.that Boccaccio states,
XV, 6, that Petrarch is celebrated even in England). In giving the word poet to Dante,
a writer in the materno sermone, Boccaccio showed more enterprise than Petrarch would
have approved of. Boccaccio, though at times rejecting the title, puts in a modest claim
to rank here himself, and Coluccio Salutati a little later calls him a poet (Epistolario
III, 228), but here it seems Chaucer would not agree with them. It is in this direction
that we are to see why Chaucer repeatedly names Dante and Petrarch and never Boc-
caccio. Chaucer mentions the name of no vernacular writer except Dante and Granson
(Venus, 82), which must be taken as a special compliment to them; doubtless Gower
(T.C., V, 1856) is named as a friend, not as a writer. (Later he alludes to him as a writer,
without naming him, in M.L. Prol., 77 flf.) He names no vernacular work (other than his
own) unless to make light of it (e.g., Sir Th., 2087-90; N.P.T., 4402), with the single
exception of the Roman de la Rose (R.R., 39; B.D., 334; L.G. W.t 329, 441, 470; Mch. T.,
2032). This is a significant exception; it is full of "sentence," and its chief author,
Jean de Meun, parades his classical erudition, seeks to make it seem more than it is, and
dissimulates his still more important debts to medieval writers (Langlois, Origines et
sources du R.R., pp. 172-73). To the Middle Ages the Roman de la Rose would seem a
"classic" in the same sense as the Divine Comedy. Boccaccio was mainly a vernacular
poet, probably almost unknown in England, not fertile in "sentence," and not on the
lofty level of Dante, who was already a classic, commented and lectured on. Authors
in the Middle Ages being cited to give weight to the quotation, not credit to the author,
Chaucer had no reason to name Boccaccio. We need make no mystery about his silence,
as has so often been done (e.g., by Professor Lounsbury, Studies in Ch., II, 234). Pro-
fessor Kittredge also remarks on the pother as to Chaucer's silence, and well shows in
this and that individual case how natural it is ("Chaucer's Lollius," Harv. Studies in Class.
Phil., XXVIII, 61 flf.). My point is that Chaucer seems to have taken pleasure in
fathering narrative and "sentence" on Dante and Petrarch, and not on Boccaccio.
This is the notable thing, to be explained as above. Other cases of make, etc., referring
to vernacular poetry are in Prol. 325, M.L. P. 57, L.G.W. 364, 366, 437, 549. Some-
thing like Chaucer's distinction between ancient and vernacular poetry is sh own even in
Milton's L' Allegro and II Penseroso.

1 Not so among classical poets. They sometimes speak of their poems with modesty
or deprecation (Catullus, No. 1; Ovid Amores i, prefatory epigram; Tristia iv. 1,
etc. ; Martial, prose Preface to Epigrams) . But with the careful finish of classi cal Latin
style, an author would hardly have risked suggesting liberties to his reader's pen, even
out of hollow compliment. On the contrary, admiring readers often asked authors to
vise" their copies of the author's works (Martial vii. 11, 17; Bridge and Lake, Select
Epigrams of Martial [Oxford, 1906], p. xxiii). Martial once, however, tells a friend or
patron (Epig. vi. 1) that if he will polish the meter his (Martial's) poems will fear less
to come to Caesar's hands.

2 Memorials of St. Dunstan (Rolls Ser., 1874), pp. 1-2: "Eotenus, inquam, ut quic-
quid hac in editione contra orthographiae normam compositoris vitio usurpatum repereris,
imperial! potentia abradere, ac ploranti pinnicula profluentis incausti in melius ab
errore reformatum emendare praec ipias. Quinetiam utriusque ordinis in utroque sexu
sagaces itidem facere permoneo."

632

THE EPILOG OF CHAUCER'S "TROILUS" 121

Orm in his dedication charges the unfortunate Walter to scrutinize
each verse of the Ormulum, that there be no word not good to trow
and to follow. Guillaume Deguilleville in his early fourteenth-
century Pelerinage de I'dme hopes his readers

doulcement corrigeront,
Se riens y a a corriger,
A amender ou retracter.1

With characteristic modesty, Boccaccio often thus invites criticism
of his prose works. At the end of the Ameto, after addressing it
(la mando) to Niccolo di Bartolo del Buono, he commits I'esa-
minazione e la correzione to the most holy church of Rome, to the
wise, and to Niccolo.2 At the end of the Vita di Dante, after speak-
ing modestly of the work, he expresses willingness "sempre e in
questo e in ogni altra cosa da ciascun piu savio, laddove io difet-
tosamente parlassi, essere corretto."3 So also in Boccaccio's Latin
works. In the introductory dedication of the De Casibus to Maghi-
nardo degli Cavalcanti he hopes his friend will not find it tiresome to
emend what is unbecoming; and in the conclusion, that the laureate
Francesco Petrarca, his distinguished preceptor, will supply what
is neglected, cut back what is superfluous, and emend anything not
consonant with Christian religion or philosophical truth.4 In the
De Genealogia Deorum (XIV, 1) he wishes King Hugo IV, of Jerusalem
and Cyprus (Hugh de Lusignan), at whose wish he wrote the book,
to refute what is not fit for his royal charity and to commend what
he finds laudable. At the end (XV, 14) he asks him to supply
defects, cut out superfluities, repair inaccuracies, and all things
according to his judgment correct and emend;5 then adds that
if the king is too busy, he entreats all upright and pious men, espe-
cially Francesco Petrarca, to remove any inadvertent errors or

1 Schick, Lydgate's Temple of Glas, p. 123; this reappears In Caxton's edition (1483)
of the English prose version (ed. K. I. Gust; London, 1859). p. 81.

2 Vol. XV, pp. 200, 201.
* Ibid., p. 10.

« Pp. 2, 272; cf. T.C., V, 1856-57, and pp. 652 flf. below.

B Pp. 352, 401. The king had died (1359) long before the publication (1371) of the
work, which left Boccaccio's hands in an unrevised state (Hortis, Opere Latins di Boc-
caccio [Trieste, 1879], p. 158; Koerting, Boccaccio's L. u. W. [Leipzig, 1880], pp. 719-21;
Hauvette, Boccace, p. 415; O. Hecker, Boccaccio- Funde, p. 134) ; why he ignores the king's
death is an unsolved puzzle. Dante characteristically never invites criticism; sending
the Paradiso to Can Grande, he says in the letter now generally recognized as genuine,
"vobis adscribo, vobis oflero, vobis denique recommendo " — nothing more.

122 JOHN S. P. TATLOCK

convert them to religious truth, for he wishes the work to be sub-
mitted to their judgment and discretion.1

Usually these requests for correction seem to be sincere. "B,"
in spite of his portentous style, perhaps was none too sure of his
own latinity. Boccaccio is perhaps usually sincere, especially when
he appeals to Petrarch; as we shall see, in the De Genealogia he is
exceedingly anxious not to give religious offense. Further, with
the medieval lack of all kinds of books of reference, any scholarly
prose writer (as Boccaccio was underneath his verbiage and flattery)
would be glad to have errors called to his notice, and even corrected
by the discreet in copies to be used by scribes. Requests that
errors be called to the writer's attention are common enough even
in modern prefaces. The request was a high compliment to a
dedicatee's learning and discretion, not too dangerous if he had
sense enough not to take too much advantage of it. Sometimes,
especially later, the request seems more conventional and perfunctory.

When Chaucer directs his book to moral Gower and philosophical

Strode,

To vouchen sauf, ther nede is, to corecte,
Of your benignitees and zeles gode,

he is not necessarily, but not improbably may be, following Boc-
caccio's example.2 He shows more boldness than Boccaccio, who

1 There is a like request in Boccaccio's letter to Pietro di Monteforte (Hortis, p. 292) .
Cf. also the Liber de Montibus, p. 503; but he seems to warn, too, against rash correc-
tion. Laurent de Premierfait, in the prologue to his translation of Boccaccio's De
Caaibus, says it is proper to emend or correct not only one's own work but also others'
(Hortis, p. 740), and acts accordingly; Lydgate praises him for so doing (Schick, Lydgate's
Temple of Glas, p. 122).

2 Of the works of Boccaccio quoted above several were well known to Chaucer, later
at any rate, and there is no reason to doubt at the date of T.C. There was far more
spontaneity and originality in the Middle Ages than the mechanical-minded critic
always sees, and of course the foregoing precedents do not all constitute a lineal tradition.
But it is pretty clear that Chaucer both continues and transmits one. In Chaucer's
own works the passage in question is not the only one where he invites correction. In the
midst of the climax of the Troilus (III, 1328-36, see p. 639 below) he invites experienced
lovers to correct his words as they will. At the end of the part of the S.N. Prol. which
in general is original with Chaucer, he speaks modestly of the merits of the legend, and
prays his readers "that ye wol my werk amende" (84). On the date of the Invocacio
in S.N. P., there has been much difference of opinion. Compare Kittredge, Date of
Chaucer's Troilus (Ch. Soc., 1909), pp. 40-41; Tatlock, Devel. and Chron., p. xi; Brown,
Modern Philology, IX, 12-16; E. P. Hammond, Ch., a Bibl. Manual, pp. 315-16. In
Para. Prol., 55-60, he puts the "meditation" which follows "under correction of clerks,"
and protests again that he will "stand to correction." These requests are rather apart
from the fiction, and are meant less for the tellers' auditors than for Chaucer's readers.
But they have a more perfunctory sound than the request at the end of the Troilus,

634

THE EPILOG OF CHAUCER'S "TROILUS" 123

never risked such an invitation in case of a poem. Doubtless
Chaucer knew his men. The invitation was too unusual in England
of that day to pass as a mere empty compliment. But as will
appear in the next section, he may have had a particular reason
(for inviting their suggestions and appending their names.1

Far the most interesting part of the Epilog is the fourth
(11. 1835-55). To the historical imagination the twenty-sixth canto
of Dante's Inferno scarcely shows a more impressive meeting of
the ancient and medieval worlds than this:

0 yonge fresshe folkes, he or she,
In which that love up groweth with your age,
Repeyreth hoom from worldly vanitee,2
And of your herte up-casteth the visage
To thilke god that after his image
Yow made, and thinketh al nis but a fayre
This world, that passeth sone as floures fayre

which differs from most of the parallels except those in Boccaccio by asking criticism
from specified persons. The scribe sometimes invites correction of his errors; at the
end of Chaucer's Truth in MS Fairfax 16 some Adam the Scrivener made his come-back
with Qui legit emendat scriptorem non reprehendat.

* This usage too was followed in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England, largely
doubtless after Chaucer's example. It is a highly sophisticated custom, contrasting with
the purely pious ending of earlier and popular literature. No doubt it is often mere
compliment or forestalling of criticism. The exaggerated compliment and humility
are significant of the new kind of audience for which men were writing, and of the
increased frequency of writing for literary patrons; all this points toward the literary
conditions which prevailed till the eighteenth century. It is not enough recognized that
sycophancy toward patrons is one reason for the poor and shop-worn character of fifteenth-
century literature. For cases of the request see Schick, op. cit., pp. 122-23, for many
cases in Lydgate, Caxton, Skelton, and others; see also Ham. Studies and Notes, V, 213,
and Lydgate's Troy Book, V, 3482; Hoccleve's Balade to the Duke of York, 11. 44 ff.,
which asks the amending and correcting of Master Picard; Caxton's History of Reynard
the Fox (ed. Goldsmid, II, 120) ; his Eneydos, requesting Skelton's and others' corrections
(E.E. T.S., pp. 3, 4) ; Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (ed. Sommer, I, 7) ; Book of Curtesye,
(E.E.T.S., end); Golden Legend, prologue; History of Jason, dedication. Compare
Lyndesay's Monarchic, 11, 116—17; also Montaigne's Essais, I, chap. 56. He who runs
may still read it (along with the "Go little book") hi the address to the user in the
front matter of Baedeker's guides (English editions), taken from Ros's Belle Dame
sans Merci (Oxford Chaucer, VII).

2 The other world as man's home is a common medieval idea. See Chaucer's Truth,
17, 19; Boethius, De Cons. Phil, i, p. 5; Roman de la Rose, 5015 ff., and the Middle English
version, 5657 ff. (both in the Chaucer Soc. edition) ; the Ormulum, 7491 ; the end of
Thomas Aquinas' well-known hymn, O Salutaris,

Qui vitam sine termino
Nobis donet in patria;

also Orosius' Historiae adversum Paganos, V, 2: "Utor temporarie omni terra quasi
patria, quia quae vera est et ilia quam amo patria in terra penitus non est." There is a
rather mundane parallel to these first two stanzas in Merch. T., 1275-76 and thereabouts;
the amours of bachelors are but childish vanity compared with the stable bliss of married
folks. The passage is ironical and has none of the sudden shift. Another reference on
"God's country "is St. Gregory, Moralia, XXXI, 21 (Migne, Pair. Lat., LXXVII, 601-2).

635

124 J<yiN S. P. TATLOCK

And loveth him, the which that right for love
Upon a cros, our soules for to beye,
First starf, and roos, and sit in hevene a-bove;
For he nil falsen no wight, dar I seye,
That wol his herte al hoolly on him leye.
And sin he best to love is, and most meke,
What nedeth f eyned loves for to seke ?

Lo here, of Payens corsed olde rytes,
Lo here, what alle hir goddes may availle;
Lo here, these wrecched worldes appetytes;
Lo here, the fyn and guerdon for travaille
Of Jove, Appollo, of Mars, of swich rascaille!
Lo here, the forme of olde clerkes speche
In poet rye, if ye hir bokes seche.

Here we see Catholic tradition and classic-Renascence tradition in
combat, and the victory for the time with the Catholic. That

) Chaucer was sincere in this quasi-retraction of his great love poem
goes without saying. His sublimation of earthly to heavenly love
and of pagan to Christian faith can leave no one unmoved. Yet to
some modern readers the passage is surprising, even unaccountable,
and one cannot but ask, I trust without distressing analyses and
prying about as if we were the devil's spies — one cannot but ask,
I say, why he wrote it. We must not regard this ending as merely
throwing back an ironical light over what precedes, so that we
should read the story a second time with quickened understanding.
The feeling in the Epilog is in no way foreshadowed at the beginning

\ or elsewhere; it does not illumine or modify; it contradicts.1 The
heartfelt worldly tale is interpreted in an unworldly sense. He
tells the whole story in one mood and ends in another.2

1 It illustrates the looser conception of unity prevailing in medieval poetry, just as
the presentment of Criseyde's personality does, according to one interpretation of it. In
each case the tale develops in a free, expansive, and sympathetic way, and then at the
end swerves back to tradition. Knowing his readers to be aware of what Criseyde
will finally do, Chaucer feels no responsibility for making it seem inevitable, and devotes
himself to making her simpatica. A Criseyde such as Chaucer represents her may
seem unlikely to do as she does at the end, but a Criseyde notoriously foredoomed to do
so might have appeared like Chaucer's Criseyde.

2 The ending gives the poem some of the manner of the allegory and the fable,
except that the interpretation is sudden and arbitrary. In somewhat like manner
Boccaccio's prose romance Ameto ends its chronicle of social scandal clad in voluptuous
symbols by sublimating its characters into the theological and cardinal virtues, who
sing the praise of the Trinity. His manner of getting his literary fun, and then saving
himself by saying he didn't mean it, gives one more esteem for his ingenuity than for his

636

THE EPILOG OF CHAUCER'S "TROILUS" 125

The first two stanzas express the natural enough revulsion of
a medieval mind to the strong emotion and painful outcome of
the love story. Throughout Chaucer shows greater depth than
Boccaccio in the Filostrato, being more critical as well as older when
he wrote it; which makes the passage at first more surprising, but
also more accountable. A revulsion it is, or, if anyone prefers, a
sudden transcending. It is not enough to sum up the poem by
saying — this is the loveliness and tragedy of human life— but there
is something better than human life. Though in the opening lines
of the poem and all through we are warned of the tragedy to come,
a touching and dignified tragedy it is to be, there is a sense that
nothing is better than happy love, and a pretense that the poet is a
wistful outsider to the greatest thing in the world. There is not a
hint of detachment or sense of the vanity or unworthiness of love.1
This, like many emotional poems, is to sober the thoughtless and
happy, and open their hearts to the woes of the luckless. The open-
ing is full of religion, but it is the religion of love. And now all
the importance of the story is snatched from it. We are prepared
to find false felicity a tragedy, but not a flitting shadow on a wall.

sincerity. Chaucer's good sense made him disavow rather than allegorize his voluptu-
ousness and paganism. There is no trace anywhere in Chaucer's works of the allegoriz-
ing or euhemerizing treatment of mythology (on which see p. 645 below), a notable tribute
to his strength of mind. The modern finds more pleasure in Chaucer's way, artless
though it seems. "You," he says to his young friends of his own day, "don't you do as
the pagans did; they knew no better." Usually it is only our heedlessness and ignorance
that makes Chaucer seem artless. Witness the subtle dramatic skill with which he makes
the Franklin condemn for his own day the practices on which his tale hinges.

» And preyeth for hem that ben in the cas
Of Troilus, as ye may after here.
That love hem bringe in hevene to solas [I, 29-31].

And biddeth eek for hem that been at ese,
That god hem graunte ay good perseveraunce,
And sende hem might hir ladies so to pi ese,
That it to Love be worship and plesaunce.
For so hope I my soule best avaunce,
To preye for hem that Loves servaunts be,
And wryte hir wo, and live in charitee [I, 43-9].

Rhetoric of course, but it leads harmoniously if rather seriously into the tale. Later
the talk of changeful fortune, false felicity, and the doom hanging over the city would
prepare even one ignorant of the story for a defeat of love, but a painful and worthy
defeat. As to Chaucer's disclaimer of knowing love, it was not meant to be greeted
with a smile. What he means is this peculiar combination of love, poetry, conven-
tionality, sentimentalism, and sensuality, which may well have been outside his
experience.

637

126 JOHN S. P. TATLOCK

In the earlier form of the poem the blow is particularly sudden,1 and
it was probably to lessen the shock that Chaucer inserted the three
stanzas from the Teseide, and made Troilus himself gently lead us
upward by himself learning to condemn

al our werk that folweth so

The blinde lust, the which that may not laste.

f Further, Chaucer had his audience to think of. How far at
I the end he was voicing his own feeling and how far theirs, who can
! say? But both must have weighed. Fictitious narrative was
fresher to the medievals, made a keener impression on them than
on us, and it is hard to exaggerate the piercing reality which they
must have felt in this poem. This is partly due to the unparalleled
veracity of the story and partly to its large use of lyric expression,
more novel, agreeable, and impressive to the fourteenth-century
reader of romance than to us.2 High and ennobling as the poem is,
' in no other medieval work is physical passion depicted with such
naturalness and sympathy and made so attractive. Elsewhere
sensuous narrative tends to be comic, and serious love narrative to
be reserved. The senses, being outlawed by medieval theory, could
be indulged only in a light mood. None of Chaucer's other love
stories is intense enough to call for such a disclaimer. It is certain
also that he was presenting social conditions which he knew would
seem strange to English readers.3 The court of Edward of England

1 Directly after Troilus' tragic death comes the ascetic disavowal of all that had
made his life charming, and the call to a higher love. The disavowal at the end rings
truer than the love piety at the beginning, which is of a piece with the conventional
element throughout the poem. To disentangle the traditional from the real is the
chief problem of the poem, not yet solved. They are mingled all through, for here as
elsewhere Chaucer's method is the vivifying of the traditional.

a This was one of Boccaccio's great contributions to narrative, due to the fact that
he wrote in an age remarkable for lyric.

^ » This is quite clear from II, 27-49. In sundry ages and lands there are sundry
usages to win love; we are not to wonder at Troilus' way, or say "I would not do so,"
many roads lead to Rome —

Eek hi som lond were al the gamen shent,
If that they ferde in love as men don here,
As thus, in open doing or in chere,
In visitinge, in forme, or seyde hir sawes;
For-thy men seyn, ech contree hath his lawes.

In II, 365-80 (not in the Filoatrato), it is doubtless insincerely that Pandarus to embolden
Troilus imports English social freedom into this Italianate Troy, in contrast with the
passage above. Here is one among various instances of that combination of the exotic
and artificial with the universal and realistic which adds so much to the interest and
beauty of the poem, yet makes its interpretation so hard. There is more than tradi-

638

THE EPILOG OF CHAUCER'S "TROILUS" 127

was neither so artificial nor so immoral as the court of Robert of
Naples (for all Mrs. Alice Ferrers and other occasional scandals).
Earlier in the poem too he shows a like consciousness. He invites
his auditors (III, 1324-36) to do as they will with his additions to
the story, and declares that he speaks always subject to the cor-
rection of those acquainted with love, to add or diminish as they
will:

But sooth is, though I can not tellen al,

As can myn auctor, of his excellence,

Yet have I seyd, and, god to-forn, I shal

In every thing al hoolly his sentence.

And if that I, at loves reverence,

Have any word in eched for the beste,

I)oth therwith-al right as yourselven leste.

For myne wordes, here and every part,
I speke hem alle under correccioun
Of yow, that feling han in loves art,
And putte it al in your discrecioun
T encrese or maken diminucioun
Of my langage, and that I yow bi-seche;
But now to purpos of my rather speche.

This is in the midst of the climax of the story. The fact may have
no significance, but the insertion is probably due to the intense
character of the climax, beyond even what it is in Boccaccio. Four
points are notable. There is a similar less conciliatory passage at
the beginning of the climax (III, 1193-97):

I can no more, but of thise ilke tweye,
To whom this tale sucre be or soot,
Though that I tarie a yeer, som-tyme I moot,
After myn auctor, tellen hir gladnesse,
As wel as I have told hir hevinesse.

Secondly, the passage 1324-37, in some MSS representing a revised
version, is removed to the end of the amorous climax, as if to make
clearer to what part it refers especially.1 Again, the other passage

tional "courtly love" in it; otherwise Chaucer would not have been moved to his final
disclaimer. Clandestine love was familiar enough in literature to Chaucer's readers,
and he, a court poet steeped in the same love poetry which they read, was familiar with
their notions as to love affairs. Elements in the poem which otherwise would have
been almost unnoticed he realized would acquire strong effect from its reality and
emotionality.

i Root, Textual Tradition of Chaucer's Troilus (Ch. Soc., 1916), 157, 250.

639

128 JOHN S. P. TATLOCK

(V, 1858) where Chaucer invites correction is in a like connection,
shortly after he disowns the amorous vanity of the poem. Finally,
in several parts of the Canterbury Tales there is an analogous
apology in analogous circumstances.1 With the wholly new inten-
sity and reality of the poem, then,2 such an ending may well have
been felt as satisfying and as more fitting than an unreligious close
or a mere perfunctory muttered Qui cum Patre.

But in the third stanza, why this objurgation of pagans' cursed
old rites, and all this about the futility of then- gods and the empty
reward of service to Jove, Apollo, Mars, and such rabble ?

The Troilus is a learned poem. In its use of classical myth
and so far as possible of classical lore in general it goes beyond
anything else Chaucer wrote.3 Its ancient coloring proves much

» Ladies, I prey yow that ye be nat wrooth;
I can nat glose, I am a rude man [Merch. T., 2350-51].

In swich manere, it may nat ben expressed
But if I wolde speke uncurteisly [ibid., 2362-63].
Cf. also Prol., 725-42, Mill. Prol., 3169-86, Mane. T., 205-11; also H.F., I, 245-48.

* This is the point. Had the poem contained no more than certain social pretenses
about love, and an exaltation of fortune and destiny at the expense of providence and
free will, there would have been nothing unusual enough to call out an unusual ending.

* Professor Kittredge was the first to show this feature of the poem in detail, in an
article which by a current of brilliant sense clears the air of the Lollius mystification.
See "Chaucer's Lollius," in Harv. Studies in Class. Phil., XXVIII, 47-133, especially pp.
50-54; also Cummings, Indebtedness of Chaucer's Works to the Italian Works of Boccaccio
(Cincinnati, 1916), p. 67, who had previously touched on the matter; and Ayres in
Romanic Rev., X, 9-10. Kittredge says, p. 50: "In furtherance of his general fiction as
to source, and with the same purpose of lending his work an air of truth and vividness
and authenticity, Chaucer added a multitude of classical touches that are wanting in
the Filostrato." I do not believe, nor apparently does Professor Kittredge, that the
mam purpose of the classical touches was to carry out the Lollius fiction. I should be
as ready to belie\e that the case stood the other way around. A small amount or entire
absence of ancient details would have excited nobody's skepticism as to the Lollius source.
The emphasis on the ancient source and that on the ancient setting are both in the
service of the air of veracity. It is because he had meant to reproduce ancient life that
he says:

Lo here, the forme of olde clerkes speche

In poetrye, if ye hir bokes seche! [V, 1854-55].

This shows a consciousness that he has been writing in a style new to his countrymen,
that he is in a sense reviving the antique style. But "old clerks" does not mean Boc-
caccio, nor particularly the supposed ancient writer Lollius. How far Chaucer felt the
Italian Renascence in Boccaccio to be a revival of the manner of Ovid and others, and
how far he recognized it as something wholly new, is hard to say. As to the nature of
the ancient detail, study of the ancients was so nearly confined to purely literary reading
that there is little in the Troilus by way of " antiquities." In the Franklin's Tale, where
he was demonstrably desirous of an ancient atmosphere, he got it only by means of
ancient names and paganism. But here he had it in mind to recognize such of these
other matters as he found in literature (e.g., V, 302 ft*., cremation, "pleyes palestral,"
offering arms to the gods; cf. Virgil A en. xi. 7-8). Pandarus refers to Oenone's letter
to Paris (i. 652-58; from Ovid's Her aides) in an offhand domestic sort of way, as if it

640

THE EPILOG OF CHAUCER'S "TROILUS" 129

careful reading and wariness in composing.1 It is certain that
Chaucer took pains to avoid such an excess of contemporary medie-
val color as would have marred the remote romantic background
which gave dignity to the emotional romance.2 The penetrating

had been talked over in the family, a device well known to historical novelists. He often
uses ancient words which he feels it necessary to define (sometimes incorrectly). Troilus
asks that the ashes of his heart be put "in a vessel, that men clepeth an urne" (V 311)
Diomed speaks of the " Manes, which that goddes ben of peyne" (V, 892), and of Catenas'
possible "ambages," which he takes two lines to define (V, 897-99), alluding to the well-
known equivocations of oracles. Criseyde swears by "Satiry and Pauny," and defines
them as "halve goddes of wildernesse" (IV, 1544-45); also by the Simois as the river
running through Troy (1548-49). Pandarus refers to Tityus as tormented by "foules
that highte volturis" (I, 788). See also V, 319. The hasty modern reader thinks all
this pedantry, as if Chaucer were airing his learning; his real purpose was to make his
coloring intelligible to an age greedy of information and without dictionaries, as in the
explanatory footnotes of such a historical novelist as Georg Ebers. The use of hard
words with explanations is extremely common in Chaucer's Boethius. written about this
time. His art may seem at times artless, but it is not pedantry (cf. Lounsbury, Studiet
in Chaucer, III, 365 ff.). The lines (II, 22-25),

Ye knowe eek, that in forme of speche is chaunge

With-inne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho

That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and straunge

Us thinketh hem ; and yet they spake hem so,

show Chaucer's consciousness of strange words and turns of language. Their abundance
may be one reason why he prays for his poem (V, 1797-98)

And red wher-so thou be, or elles songe,
That thou be understonde I god beseche!

Cf . my Scene of the Fkl. T. Visited, p. 36 There is an interesting later Old French

parallel to Chaucer's use of local color. About 1450-52 Jacques Milet wrote his drama-
tized Istoire de la Destruction de Troye la Grant, founded on the usual medieval source*.
He made a conscious effort to diffuse ancient color over his work, and to restore ancient
life. This was most successful, because easiest, in religious matters; he strives to
introduce the gods and pagan religious practices, and also such things as the burning
of the dead. In battle scenes he is medieval, and in general seems hardly to color as
successfully as Chaucer does. See Ausg. u. Abh., LIV (Meybrinck, Auffassung der Antike
bei J. Milet), XCVI (Hapke, Kritische Beitrage zu J. Milet' s dramatischer Istoire), and
the reproduction of the editio princeps by E. Stengel (Marburg and Paris, 1883). Among
Chaucer's French and English contemporaries, as in such a work as Gower's Confessio
Amantis, which is full of ancient fiction, there is little or no attempt at such artful coloring.

1 The knight in the Wife of Bath's Tale (1085) "walweth and he turneth to and
fro" in bed. Troilus (V, 211-12) goes to bed, "and weyleth there and torneth In furie,
as dooth he, Ixion, in helle." A few (not many) of the later revisions in the poem seem
meant to increase the ancient color (Root, Textual Tradition, p. 201, and my Devel. and
Chronol.,~p. 5).

2 The poem was as romantic to the fourteenth-century reader as to us, but for a dif-
ferent reason. It is romantic to us because it is medieval; we are not greatly impressed
with the ancient touches, and take them for granted, while the medieval touches give an
incongruity which may even make the modern smile at times, but in general are the
cue for a sensation of romance. What strikes the modern in the matter of setting is
the religious festival in honor of the Trojan relic (I, 153), Troilus "catching attrition"
(I, 557), Criseyde discovered sitting in her paved parlor listening to the romance of
Thebes (II, 82-84), her protest that she should be reading saints' lives in a cave (117-18),
her reflection that she is not a nun (759), the reference to Jove's Christmas ("natal
Joves fest," III, 150; see a similar mixture in Dante, Purg., VI, 118-19, "o sommo
Giove, Che fosti in terra per noi crociflsso"). Such things as these the medieval reader
took for granted and passed with hardly a glance. But he was greatly impressed with
the strangeness of the ancient detail. Sometimes his reaction would be complex. When

641

130 JOHN S. P. TATLOCK

modern is surprised at the small number of anachronisms.1 Of
course we find God and the devil often mentioned, and occasion-
ally other Christian phraseology, but without question Chaucer
avoided it. Such things as distinctively Christian oaths are rare;
no saint is mentioned.2 Consciously ancient touches, on the other
hand, surprise us by their frequency and variety. Where they
come from we need not inquire just now, but they must repre-
sent much reading for this very purpose. It is safe to say that
Chaucer could hardly have put in more without pedantry and
" forcing it." Whether deliberately or not, so far as he could,
Chaucer precisely undid the medievalizing introduced into the
Troy story by Benoit de S. Maure.3

Criseyde, to hearten Troilus, talks to him and plans to talk to her father with blasphem-
ous skepticism about the gods (IV, 1397-1411), and when Troilus curses them (V, 206-8),
this is partly realism — the sort of thing a desperate medieval lover might have said of
his own religion, much what Aucassin says in Aucassin et Nicolette; it would also have
edified a serious medieval to hear a pagan speak of the pagan gods just as an orthodox
divine would have done (though Chaucer was not aiming at this effect) . Such passages
are examples of Chaucer's skill in realizing the strange. His realism makes the strange
no less strange, but more memorable. Criseyde's speech just mentioned is particularly
curious. It is founded on nothing in Boccaccio, but developed from passages in Guide's
Historia (Strassburg, 1489, sig.ISro) and Statius' Thebaid (III, 661). A superior medieval
reader might have been struck as we are by Criseyde's air of infidelity, and have thought
she risked joining Statius' Capaneus, whom she here quotes, in Dante's Inferno, canto
XIV. On the other hand her sentiments literally are unexceptionable from a Christian
point of view (cf. Guido, sig.E4vo; Vincent of Beauvais, Spec. Hist., X, 85; Spec. Mor.,
Ill, iii, 27; Lydgate, Troy Book, II, 5916 flf.; Orosius, Hist. adv. Paganos, VI, 1, opined
that men, knowing the one God, invented many gods through undiscerning fear). The
docile and small-minded reader would have liked her the better for showing disaffection
to paganism, just as a narrow-minded Protestant might exult to hear that the people of
Brazil are not good Catholics. Likewise much of Pandarus' skepticism as to dreams, etc.
(V, 358 fl.), is good theology. Pew medievals would have thought of either as a skeptic.

1 There is less than the hasty reader thinks. It was no more an anachronism to
call the Palladium a relic and Amphiorax a bishop (II, 104) than for us to call a minister
of Jupiter a priest ("presbyter" writ small). Some of the medieval language only
heightened for the medieval reader the actuality of the ancient element. Christian
language was constantly applied in the Middle Ages to the religion of love (cf. Dodd.
Courtly Love in Chaucer and Gower, pp. 190 fl*.). To the superficial modern all this is
merely incongruous and " quaint"; to the medieval, more familiar with church language
than with anything else in the poem, it made the picture of ancient life more serious and
lifelike.

2 Saint Idiot (I, 910) is not in the calendar.

s Benoit, also sophisticated and ingenious, is remarkably careful about the ancient
proprieties for a twelfth-century poet, but much less elaborately than Chaucer and with
more mixture of the incongruous medieval. He never shows aversion to paganism.
Guido delle Colonne, on the other hand, who put Benoit's work into Latin at the pleasure
of the archbishop of Salerno, makes a point more than once of expressing aversion, and
of explaining away such striking pagan prodigies as oracles. That is, where the Troy
narrative of Benoit is noxiously heathen, Guido proffers an antidote (1489 edition,
sig.E4yo, I3ro, etc.).

642

THE EPILOG OF CHAUCER'S "TROILUS" 131

When we compare the Troilus with its source all this is more
striking. Not only does little of its ancient air come from the
Filostrato, much of it being inserted even where he is translating
closely;1 there is five or ten times as much in the English poem as
in the Italian, even in proportion to its greater length. Further,
such things in the Filostrato are commonplace and facile in character;
youthful though not juvenile, it is hardly a learned poem. In the
Troilus such details are on the whole not such as an ordinary well-
read man could have drawn at will from his memory. Its heedful
congruity becomes still more striking when we compare it with
Chaucer's other poems of ancient setting, the Knight's Tale, the
Legend of Good Women, the Monk's, the Physician's, the Franklin's,
and the Manciple's tales. In them, it is true, he usually applies or
retains enough ancient coloring to secure a certain fitness, and
usually does not greatly medievalize,2 but in none of them do we
find the same effort for an intimate3 use of mythology so conspicu-
ous in the Troilus, and much of it was inevitable considering their
sources. It will pay particularly to consider the Knight's Tale. It
has as much ancient color as the Troilus, if not more; this is only
natural, since the poem deals with externals, not primarily with
feelings. But there are these differences. Instead of increasing
the ancient color of the Teseide, Chaucer has greatly reduced it;
the Teseide is more classical than the Knight's Tale, the Filostrato,

1 Here are a few fair specimens of Chaucer's method:

Daun Phebus or Apollo Delphicus [I, 70]. Del grande Apollo .... [Fil., I, 8]

Pro Flegiton, the fery flood of helle [III, 1600] d' inferno .... [Ill, 56]

Ther-as the doom of Mynos wolde it dighte [IV, 1188] nell' inferno . . . .

[IV, 120]

And Attropos, make redy thou my bere! [IV, 1208] ch' io me ne vo

sotterra [IV, 123].

See also T.C., I, 859, 878; II, 1062; III, 1428, 1807; V, 3, 7; for considerable
passages added see IV, 1138 ff., 1538 fl., 1543 ff.

* In the Franklin's Tale he is especially careful of his ancient color, for a very special
reason; but he expresses the lowest opinion of certain of the pagan rites, thus producing
an effect of detachment. In the Legend he deliberately introduces ecclesiastical color
into ancient matter. He knew how to vary his harmonizing or accompaniment, to an
extent rare in the Middle Ages.

3 Contrast the manner of the Troilus with the detached air of, e.g., L.O. W., 786-87.
2602, Fkl.T., 1131-34, 1271-72, 1292-93. The ancient examples in the Monk's T. are
baldly told; there is little regard for setting in the Phys. T. In the Mane. T. ancient
color seems conspicuously avoided, Ovid's story being here metamorphosed into a moral
example with fabliau traits.

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132 JopN S. P. TATLOCK

even the Troilus.1 He is less careful to exclude the medieval. The
mythology is less varied and learned. Finally, it is treated less
congruously and seriously; there is more tendency to identify the
gods with the like-named planets, which would make the power
attributed to them less strange to a medieval;2 a tendency, also,
which accords with the lighter tone of the work, to treat ancient
beliefs and rites humorously.3 All this means that Chaucer took
more trouble over the ancient atmosphere of the Troilus and took
it more seriously.

The effect of Chaucer's resurrection of antiquity on his fourteenth-
century audience is a subtle subject which requires nicety of inter-
pretation as well as grasp of fact. Here I shall merely suggest a
little of it. If we fill our imagination for a few moments with the
literature in English and French to which they were used, we shall
feel, as they must have felt, how remarkable is the realization of
the strange in the Troilus. No earlier vernacular poem had been
set in so fitting and remote a background, yet none had presented
such keenly natural people, or such intensely real emotion, and
their momentum had carried their surroundings with them into the
current of life or vivid illusion. But the Englishman of the four-
teenth century was not ready to accept these surroundings.4 He
was not only almost without historical sense, and vital historical
knowledge, and feeling for relativity; the groundwork of his educa-
tion and all his convictions was the absolute. Above all, his religion

1 It may be in the Teseide that Chaucer found the suggestion for an elaborate classical
setting; cf. such passages as Tes, III, 44; IV, 54; XI, passim. See H. M. Cummings,
Indebtedness of Chaucer's Works to Italian Works of Boccaccio, p. 67, and Kittredge,
op. cit., pp. 50-51; also Jour, of Engl. and Germ. Phil., XIV, 226-55, especially p. 255.
In his Filocolo also Boccaccio is very attentive to his ancient coloring (largely from Ovid).

2 See note on p. 645, below.

8 In K.T., 2284-88, there is a waggish reference to Emily's ceremonial ablutions,
and in 2809-15 a frivolous-sounding summary of the fate of Arcite's departed soul;
this is not due merely to having used the original already in the Troilus; see Lounsbury.
Studies in Chaucer, II, 513-15, Kittredge in the Nation, LIV, 231, Tatlock in Modern
Philology, XIV, 266. Finally there is the passage (2925-28) where when the trees are
cut down, "the goddes ronnen up and doun" (like rabbits or field mice; cf. 2929-30);
this is in the Teseide, but seriously.

<The impression may have been like, but many times as intense as that made
some years ago by Sienkiewicz' Quo Vadis, which so remarkably realized personages like
Nero, who to most people had been mere bookish outlines. Of course the same is true
more or less of all successful historical fiction. But the point is that we moderns are
used to the effort to realize the remote, and the fourteenth century was not. As Gaston
Paris said, "Ce moyen age ... traduisait milites par chevaliers sans se douter de la dif-
fgrence qui existait entre ces deux termes" (Litt. franc., au moyen Age, p. 75).

644

THE EPILOG OF CHAUCER'S "TROILUS" 133

discouraged welcoming a strange point of view. The usual late
medieval treatment of paganism forbade understanding it. Either •
it was minimized;1 or it was condemned;2 or it was assimilated to |
medievalism.3 Cupid and Venus were adopted as harmless tra- \
ditional personifications or symbols; the gods who gave their /
names to planets could be taken somewhat seriously without too
much shock, for indeed this identification afforded a plausible
explanation of why they had come to be adored as gods ;4 the medieval
caught at every chance to see Christian verities shadowed darkly in '
pagan tradition.5 This allegorizing attitude had been due to the '

1 The Homeric account of the Trojan War was rejected because it shows the gods -
as visibly fighting among men (Benoit's Roman de Troie, 11. 60 fl. ; Guido's Historia
Trojana, ProL; Lydgate's Troy Book, Prol., 11. 267 flf.). Guido contrasts Christian truth
with the errors of those "credentes et putantes eos esse deos quorum potentia nulla
erat, .... cum per gloriosum adventum domini nostri Jesu Christi ubique terrarum
idolatria tota cessaverit, et suo penitus evanuerit exhausto vigore" (Strassburg, 1489,
sig.E4vo). But it is all wrong to speak of Guido as the "source" of Chaucer's final
attack on paganism.

2 It was assumed (for a single instance) that heathens were wicked; this especially ^
where heathenism could not be ignored, as in legends of martyrs. E.g., "A man pat
lif ed in maumetry And in fals goddes, ful of enuy" (Horstmann, Altengl. Legenden, N.F.,
p. 3; see also Gower, Vox Cl. II, x, 1 fl.; Cursor Mundi, 2304). In keeping with this
idea certain types of virtuous heroine in pagan stories are given Christian traits; two
sensitive critics have pointed this out for such an innocent as Dorigen in the Franklin'*
Tale, and such a lamb in the midst of wolves as Cordelia in early forms of the Lear story
(W. M. Hart in Haver ford Essays, p. 199; Perrett in Palaestra, XXXV, 49). Vincent
of Beauvais declares that the Greeks were worse in their religion than the Chaldeans and
adored immoral gods (Spec. Hist., XVI, 34). Chaucer's Man of Law and Prioress show
in their tales the same feeling toward non-Christian religions.

* E.g., the mythology was euhemerized or allegorized, or the gods were recognized
as real beings, demons; see Gower's Confessio Amantis, V, 835 ff., 1500 fl.. Cursor Mundi,
2286 fl., Lydgate's Troy Book, II, 5391, 5826, 5916, 5925 ff.. Boccaccio's De Gen. Dear..
I, 3, Guido's Historia, sig.E4vo., I3ro., Vincent of Beauvais, Spec. Hist., II, 102, Spec.
Mor., Ill, iii, 27; also St. Augustine, Confess., I, 16, and Isidor, Etymol., VIII, 11. It
is remarkable that Chaucer never does any of this. If mythology appears at all it is
accepted. Of course medieval writers differ greatly in sophistication and secularity;
Benoit is not to be lumped with writers of legends, or with Gower.

* Cf. p. 644 above. Dante accepts this explanation. His attitude to the gods is
complex; Inf., I, 72; Par., IV, 61-63, etc. None of the Olympian gods appear in hell
(as they do in Milton), and the Giants are punished in the nethermost pit for rebellion
against Jove (Inf., XXXI, 92). Here is one of the Renascence traits of Dante, whose
attitude may have been noticed by both Boccaccio and Chaucer. Identification with the
planets accounts for the air of half-belief which sometimes accompanies mention of the
classic deities in Chaucer and elsewhere, and even sometimes seems to determine which
are mentioned. It was not pure fiction to recognize the power of Venus, Mars, and
the rest. A good case of this rehousing of the gods is in Henryson's Testament of
Cresseid. See also Isidor, Etymol., Ill, 71.

* Consider the messianic interpretation of the Fourth Eclogue of Virgil and various
allegorizings of his works; Comparetti, Vergil in the M.A., pp. 99-103, etc.; Koerting,
Petrarca's Leben u. Werke, pp. 482-83; Sandys, Hist, of Class. Scholarship, I, 610, 615,
616; II, 5. Even Petrarch found that in the fictions of the poets "allegoricus sapidis-
simus ac iucundissimus sensus inest" (Invect. c. Med. [Basle, n.d.l, Book I, p. 1205).

645

134 JOHN S. P. TATLOCK

medieval inability or unwillingness to face the fact that the ancients
were really different from themselves. Now it is a question how
Chaucer's innovation would have seemed to the more sensitive
Englishman of his day. All through a very long poem by a con-
temporary, to have it forced into his perceptions that people pre-
cisely like those whom he knew, only more attractive, really bowed
to strange and sensual gods; to find Juno invoked for grace instead
of Mary, and Mercury instead of Michael guiding departed souls,
to hear calls for help from God and Minerva together,1 to find
God's love and Jove's amours both inspired by Venus the goddess,2 to
find such things taken for granted and perpetually forced, I say,
into his consciousness, and to find the Christian view of the world
pointedly ignored all through — all this may well have caused a
certain sense of strangeness, in some possibly of discomfort. It
would have startled those convictions on which rested both his
piety, his conduct, and his theory of the universe. "Quel e*branle-
ment pour les consciences," exclaims Renan, speaking of the new
understanding of Islam in the thirteenth century, "le jour ou 1'on
s'aperc,oit qu'en dehors de la religion que 1'on professe, il en est
d'autres qui lui ressemblent et qui ne sont pas apres tout entiere-
ment denudes de raison!"3 There are signs in the passage under
discussion that the passion in the poem was felt to express not only
"courtly love" but also the moral ideas belonging to paganism.
Paganism was dead, to be sure, but its professors in the Troilus
were very much alive. I do not say that such a feeling as I suggest
would be logical or easily defined; the feeling of mental discomfort
usually is not. But it would be natural.

Some background will help in understanding the feeling, though
one cannot reach clear-cut conclusions. How far was faith secure ?
How far was the ancient classic disapproved? This is a subject

1 St. Gregory was not the last to be displeased by such things: "In uno se ore cum
Jovis laudibus Christi laudes non capiunt" (Epist. xi. 54, in Migne, Pair. Lot. Ixxvii.
1171).

2 T.C., IV, 1116-17; V, 1827; II, 1060-63; III, 8-21. It is not that this lowering
of the divine nature would shock (cf. Lounsbury, Studies, II, 505 ff.). I am not referring
to any seeming irreverence but to a cool acceptance of polytheism. The medieval God
might be treated familiarly, provided he received proper recognition. Consider the
medieval attitude toward astrology and especially necromancy. The distinction and
emphasis are thoroughly in the medieval spirit.

3 Averroes et V Averroisme, p. 281.

646

THE EPILOG OF CHAUCER'S "TROILUS" 135

on which any generalization not so dogmatic as to be misleading
may be so vague as to be of little use. It is hard to argue from
general European conditions during centuries to the state of mind
of Chaucer's own circle, and of that we know little. All we know
is something of what his associates read, and a little of what they
wrote. Yet medieval ideas were cosmopolitan and on the whole
static, and Chaucer must have brought to his own circle even more
knowledge than they already had of European, especially Italian,
conditions.

As to the theological side of the matter, little significant back-
ground is available. Of course no intelligent person could at any '
time have actually apprehended a revival of paganism. Any
indications that way are not to be taken seriously.1 Nor was there

i Unusual cases, of small value as evidence, are the very ones that get mentioned.
One of the charges against the worldly and dissolute pope John XII in the council which
condemned him (963) was this: "in ludo aleae lovis, Veneris, ceterorumque demonum
auxilium poposcisse" (Liudprand's Historia Ottonis, in Monum. German., Scriptores III,
344). No doubt these were traditional oaths which meant nothing. In the early
eleventh century one Vilgardus, a teacher in Ravenna, was encouraged in dreams to
literary study by demons in the form of Virgil, Horace, and Juvenal, according to the
monk Glaber's Historiae, and began to teach things contrary to the faith, "dictaque
Poetarum per omnia credenda esse asserebat" (Bouquet, Recueil des Historiens, X, 23).
Whether he was a mere eccentric or a humanist born too early, he found many followers
and was condemned as a heretic (cf. Comparetti, p. 93; Hortis, Opere Latine di Boc-
caccio, p. 190; Ozanam, Documents inedits pour servir a V Histoire Litteraire de I'Jtalie,
p. 10). There is plenty of fanciful or jolly acceptance of paganism as a reality by young
Clerks in the Carmina Burana, twelfth or thirteenth century; see Stuttgart Literarischer
Verein (1847), XVI, 67-71, 124-25, 155-65, 190 (I have not seen Die lat. Vaganten-
poesie des IS. u. 13. Jh. als Kulturerscheinungen,by H. Sussmilch (Leipzig, 1917), noticed
in Herrig's Archiv, CXXXVIII, 277, which has a chapter on Die Antike in der Vagan-
tenpoesie). There is some truth/ in Walter Pater's notion of an "earlier Renaissance,"
except that the Renascence spirit always exists when a certain stage of culture is reached;
literary vigor and originality became vocal in the general forward movement of the
thirteenth century. Early in the twelfth century the troubadour Duke Guilhem IX,
of Aquitaine, has been said to have contemplated founding a religious order for the
worship of Venus. But this seems to be a ludicrous misunderstanding of some wild
talk of his recorded by the hostile William of Malmesbury (Gesta Regum Angl., Book
V, §439; Michaud, Biogr. Universelle; J. H. Smith, Troubadours at Home, II, 348).
In 1169 the possibility of reviving the Jovialis religio could be used merely to point a
gibe. Bishop Gilbert Foliot of London, in resisting the metropolitan authority of
Becket, had maintained that the pagan arch-flamen had had his see at London, "dum
Jovialis religio colebatur . ' ' John of Salisbury retorts in a letter to the Canterbury monks :
"Et fortasse vir prudens et religiosus cultum Jovis instaurare disponit, ut, si alio modo
archiepiscopari non potest, archiflaminis saltern nomen et titulum assequatur" (Materials
for the Hist, of Thomas Becket, VII, 10, Rolls Ser., No. 67). For a similar case see H. O.
Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind (3d ed.), II, 153-54. In the fifteenth century at Rome
Pomponio Leto and his little Academy scoffed at Christianity and affected a revival
of paganism, with sacrifices, an altar to Romulus, and religious honors to the Genius of
Rome. This was neither intended nor generally taken seriously, though it inevitably
meant a loosening of the bonds of Christianity, and men later are said to have attributed
to these festivals the beginning of the decline of faith. Ficino too, like the Averroists,

647

136 JOHN S. P. TATLOCK

any alarming heresy or skepticism in fourteenth-century Italy or
elsewhere before Wyclif. Most medieval heresies, being of mystical
or superstitious character, could have little bearing on a cultivated
liberalism or skepticism.1 Though modern Italians speak of the
" fundamental paganism of the Italian mind," this is not incon-
sistent with superficial orthodoxy, and complete infidelity was
rare, even in Italy, at least till the late fifteenth century. The
Catholic religion felt secure in the fourteenth century. But for
all that, the medieval mind found in both authority and experience
reason to fear peril to souls in non-Christian ideas of the super-
natural, and (as will appear) in the frivolous morality supposed to
go with them. In St. Paul's epistles and other parts of the New
Testament as well as in the Fathers and their successors, the pagan
gods are execrated as demons rather than denied as myths. A
sort of paganism maintained a real subterranean existence in the
horrifying rites of necromancy (and to a less extent in astrology),
which people knew and shuddered at; it was on the ground of
religious honors to demons and creatures that necromancy was con-
demned, and that Jeanne d'Arc and other convicted magicians
were executed. From the eleventh century on there were sub-
versive tendencies of the liberal kind, especially in Italy, such
as some of the scholastic nominalism, Averroism, the equivocat-
ing doctrine of the Twofold Truth, " Epicureanism," denial of
immortality, all that is represented by the Emperor Frederick II,

reduced all religions to one level, and regarded worship of the gods as worship of God,
not of demons. See Creighton, History of the Papacy (London, 1882-94), III, 40-44;
H. C. Lea, History of Inquis. of Middle Ages (New York, 1906), III, 570, 571; Dublin
Rev., CXVII, 318. Coluccio Salutati asked one Giuliano Zennarini to buy him a Virgil,
and was rebuked by him for desiring a heathen, a "vates mentiflcus"; Salutati inquires
where is the harm in reading pagan poets, since the pest of paganism is dead forever
and none could now revere its gods (Rosier, Card. Joh. Dominici, pp. 81-82). Such
attempts to revive antiquity, on the political rather than the religious side, will be
remembered as those of Arnold da Brescia in the twelfth century and Rienzi in the
fourteenth, who, quoting Livy and others, tried to recall their countrymen to the repub-
lican patriotism of Cato and Fabius; but only enthusiasts took such things seriously.
On supposed paganism in sixteenth-century Prance cf. Lemonnier, in Lavisse, Histoire
de France, V (Part 2), 284.

i Charles Dejob, La foi religieuse en Italic au quatorzieme sttcle (Paris, 1906) ; Felice
Tocco, L'eresia nel media evo (Florence, 1884), pp. 18, 31, 70, 71; H. O. Taylor, The
Mediaeval Mind, II, 313; H. D. Sedgwick, Italy in the Thirteenth Century (Boston,
1912), pp. 36-47, 372, etc.; H. B. Cotterill, Medieval Italy (London, 1915), Part V,
chap, i; fSmile Gebhart, Lea origines de la Renaissance en Italie (Paris, 1879), pp. 57,
68, 76, 81, 82, 195; R. Bonfadini and others, La vita italiana nel trecento (Milan, 1895)

648

THE EPILOG OF CHAUCER'S "TROILUS" 137

Farinata degli Uberti, Cavalcante, and the Cardinal degli Ubal-
dini and others.1 Among signs that the Christian explanation had
not permeated everything are such survivals of paganism as popular
irreligious fatalism,2 and such revivals of it as the literary cult of
Fortune as a goddess.3 In England of Chaucer's day we find rich
people scoffing against the Trinity.4 And at the very time when
the Troilus was being written came the most threatening attack
which the Latin church had suffered since the Albigensian heresies,
from Wyclif s theological and anticlerical innovations. On the
whole, what would tend to weaken the supremacy of traditional
Christianity, the feeling that it was the only rational and civilized
faith, unnoticed by the superficial, would displease some of the
intelligent and earnest. Paganism to fourteenth-century people
would not seem as dead as to us, partly because medieval religious
conceptions differed less than modern from ancient conceptions.
If less understood than with us, for that very reason when presented
as an actuality, paganism would seem more startling; in the dark

* Inferno, X; Grandgent refers to the Giornale Dantesco, VIII, 170; Decameron,
VI, 9; Renan, Averroes et V Averrolsme (Paris, later edition), pp. 282-84, 292, 318*
331, 334, 335, 365, 425; Gebhart, Origines de la Renaissance; P. A. Lange, Geschichte des
Materialismus (Leipzig, 1908), pp. 156, 182, 187; W. E. H. Lecky, Hist, of the Rise and
Infi. of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (New York, 1866), I, 250; H. Reuter, Ge»ch.
d. religiosen Aufklarung im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1875), Vol. II; A. D. White, Warfare
of Science with Theology (New York, 1919) ; P. W. Bussell, Religious Thought and Heresy
in the Middle Ages (London, 1918), pp. 720, 722, 760; Erdmann, History of Philosophy
(Eng. trans.), I 384; Hallam, History of the Middle Ages (New York, 1865), III, 366;
(less important) J. W. Draper, Intellectual Development of Europe and History of the
Conflict between Religion and Science. Boccaccio's story of the Jew Melchisedech and the
three rings (Decam., I, 3) has been wearisomely misused in this connection, even by
Renan; it is merely a clever evasion from a hard quandary. But Averroism did tend to
the view that one religion is as good as another.

2 Thomas Usk, Testament of Love (Skeat, Oxford Chaucer, VII) ; Arturo Graf, La
credema nella fatalita (in M iti, leggende e superstizioni del med. evo, I, 273—301 ; also in
Nuova Antologia, June, 1890).

1 Roman de la Rose, 6179-86 (Raison rebukes L'Amant for making Fortune a goddess
and exalting her to the heavens) . Dante, though using pagan language, tries to Chris-
tianize the idea (Inf., VII, 87). See B. L. Jefferson's excellent dissertation, Chaucer
and the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius (Princeton, 1917), chap ii. On this sub-
ject it is interesting to compare Montaigne's Essays, I, 56. On other kinds of literary
paganism see Ozanam, Documents inedits pour servir a I' Hist, litt. de I' Italic, pp.j!9 ff.,
28, 68.

*Piers Plowman, B, X, 51-112. In Deschamps and Gower (S.A.T.F., VI, Nos.
1167, 1222; Mirour de I'Omme, 25909-20) we find wails over the decline of faith as
shown by materialism and laxity in conduct. Elsewhere in these writers we find such
jeremiads, exaggerated sometimes by their temperaments. Some earnest souls in the
two centuries especially before the Reformation and counter-Reformation felt a hollow-
ness in religion. But it was a coldness rather than a skepticism.

649

138 JpHN S. P. TATLOCK

every bush may seem a bear. A revival of paganism, though
improbable, was thinkable to a medieval. If these are fair state-
ments, they may well form part of the background for picturing
the reaction in Italy and even in England to poetry which sub-
stituted the pagan for the Christian view of the world.

There is no lack of material for summarizing the medieval
attitude toward classical poetry.1 The general attitude held by
Christians from ancient times to the fourteenth century had varied
with circumstance and temperament rather than with epoch. As
Christianity became more firmly established, there was less opposi-
tion, but little that was new was said on the subject. Classic
poetry was not only an essential part of "Grammar," the first study
in the Trivium. It was read everywhere and all the time, to a
varying extent, for pleasure. The rigid and the ignorant had cen-
sured it as irreligious and immoral; the liberal and cultivated, from
the Fathers down, had read it really, no doubt, for its interest and
beauty, but had professed to value it for a supposed esoteric mean-
ing and its help in interpreting the language and allusions of ecclesi-
astical writers, and had explained away what is anti-Christian in it.
The fifteenth century no doubt expressed much that was under the
surface in the late fourteenth. Its avowed principles, though in-
tensified both ways as humanism advanced, did not differ greatly.2

1 Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages (London, 1895), pp. 79-94, etc.; Hortis,
Opere latine di Boccaccio, pp. 155-227; Taylor, Mediaeval Mind, II, 142-43, 159 ff., 168,
383, and in general chap, xxxi; P. A. Specht, Gesch. d. Unterrichtswesens in Deutschland
(Stuttgart, 1885), sec. 2, chap, i, pp. 45, 48, 51; Hist. litt. de la France, XIV, 113; R. L.
Poole, Illustrations of Med. Thought (1884), and article on John of Salisbury in the
D.N.B.; A. H. L. Heeren, Gesch. d. classischen Litt. im Mittelalter (Gottingen, 1822);
J. E. Spingarn, Lit. Crit. in the Ren., chap, i; Guido delle Colonne, Historia Trojana
(Strassburg, 1489), sig.E4vo, I3ro; John of Salisbury, Metalogicus, I, 2, and especially 22;
Richard of Bury, Philobiblon, chap, xiii ("Quare non omnino negleximus fabulas poet-
arum"; he quotes Bede to the same effect); St. Gregory, Epist., xi, 54 (Migne, Pair.
Lat., LXXVII, 1171); St. Basil the Great, Hp6s rot* note, 6wut &» i£ 'EXXrjviKuv &<t*\-
oivro \6yuv (Migne, Pair. Graeca, XXXI, 564 ff.). The attitude of caution or hostility
toward classical poetry had merely been intensified by the Christians from that of
pagan moralists; as for instance in Plutarch's Ufa dtl rt>v ve6v TTOIIJU&TUV faoveiv (Wytten-
bach's ed., Vol. I, Part I), and of course Plato's Republic, Book x. During the twelfth
century many writers are said to have objected to and themselves abandoned the study
of the classics (Sandys, Hist. Class. Schol., I, 594-96; Hortis, Op. lot. di. Bocc., pp. 212).
Most modern writers content themselves with discussing the attitude of the Fathers;
little is collected on the attitude of the Middle Ages. The best modern writers are
Comparetti, Hortis, and Taylor. Spingarn's Criticism in the Renaissance tends to
niinimize the continuity of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. See also St. Augus-
tine, Confess., I, 16; and Saintsbury, Hist, of Criticism, I, 378 ff.

2 Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati (ed. F. Novati; Rome, 1893 ff., Vols. XV-XIX of
the publications of the Istituto Storico Italiano) , 111,221 ff., 230, 539 ff.; IV, 170 ff., 205 ff.,

650

THE EPILOG OF CHAUCER'S "TROILUS"

139

The freshened interest in Greek and Roman writers was not a
genuine revival of Hellenism; uncritical mysticism was rife as
ever, as we see in Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. People read
ancient poetry, as they had always done, because they liked it;
attack and defense were prosecuted on much the same avowed
grounds of impiety, viciousness, and worldliness, of allegorical and
historical edification. Yet, as a critic has said, some students
believed that in their day was rising the very same sun which
had set at the fall of Roman culture. It is not surprising that
churchmen took an attitude of hostility, for the classical revival
seemed to contradict the fundamentals of their morality and was
destined to destroy the theory of a theocracy and undo the work
of the early church. At bottom there was a change which threatened
faith and morals. The early humanists did not attack the church,
but some of them became estranged. Even at the first, admirers
of the classics often took pains to imply or state their Catholic
orthodoxy,1 which implies that others were suspicious of it.

To draw back nearer to Chaucer, Petrarch and Boccaccio did
not free themselves from the tendency to interpret mythology by
euhemerizing and allegorizing. Herein they were sincere; it was
also the best way to win toleration for their studies. None the
less they were innovators. Both sincere Catholics, beyond any

231; Scelta di Curiosita, LXXX; M. G. Dominici, Lucula Noctis (ed. R. Coulon; Paris.
1908; from this first important attack on humanism Rosier quotes the sentiment,
"Utilius est Christianis terrain arare, quam gentilium intendere libris"); Aug. Rftsler,
Cardinal Johannes Dominici (Freiburg, 1893), pp. 64-101; J. H. Robinson, The New
History, pp. 116-17; Geiger, Renaissance u. Humanismus; Historische Zeitschrift, XXXVIII,
193 ff.; Schiick, Zur Characteristik d.Ital. Humanisten d. 14. u. 15. Jh. (Breslau, 1857);
Voigt, Wiederbelebung d. class. Alterthums (Berlin, 1893), I, 6-8; II, 213, 467, 469; J. O.
Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (tr. Middlemore) ; J. A. Symonds,
Renaissance in Italy; Sandys, Hist, of Class. Schol.; other works cited earlier. On
the attitude of the regular clergy see Comparetti's references, p. 85, Richard of Bury's
Philobiblon, chap, vi, and Taylor, Mediaeval Mind, II, 426. As early as 1399-1406 a
vigorous controversy as to the religious and moral effects of classical study was carried
on between Coluccio Salutati on the humanist side and such men as Giovanni di Sam-
miniato and Giovanni Dominici on the side of the regulars (see Epistolario and R5sler's
book above).

J Salutati and Boccaccio did so. Carlo Malatesta (1385-1429), Lord of Rimini,
an admirer of antiquity, said to have modeled his conduct after ancient heroes, so far
shifted his sympathies as to overthrow a statue of Virgil at Mantua, on the ground that
images were for the saints, not the poets, above all pagan poets — "Histriones," he calls
them. " Sed in primis novum Religionis genus vide, immo ver6 Superstitionis. Sanctis
deberi Status, ait; Poetis negat; atque huic minus, qudd Gentilis fuerit," writes the
eminent humanist Vergerio with amazement (L. A. Muratori, Rerum Ital. Scriptores
[Milan, 1730], XVI, 217-19).

651

140 JOHN S. P. TATLOCK

man for many centuries before they endeavored to understand the
ancients as they were. They formed a Concordat between the
Catholic faith and classical scholarship which lasted five hundred
years and, indeed, has not been revoked yet; but it was by no
means understood or approved of in their day, especially by the
clergy and members of other learned professions. Petrarch's
admiration for Virgil is well known to have led in 1352 to an accusa-
tion of the study of magic from a cardinal.1 The physician against
whom Petrarch inveighed attacked poets as hostile to the true
faith and to be shunned by the faithful.2 Boccaccio seems to have
suffered more than Petrarch. He was also less consistent, stable,
and philosophical in his views; superficially Christian, essentially
pagan, believing himself a thorough Catholic but with a deeper
sympathy for antiquity. The folk of Certaldo at the close of his
life thought him a sorcerer, who held commerce with the devil.3
Holding the same suspicions as those held by the cardinal against
Petrarch, no doubt they too were misled by Boccaccio's studies.
In this connection far the most interesting of his works is the
De Genealogia Deorum. Begun between 1340 and 1350 and prob-
ably published in 137 1,4 it was the earliest purely scholarly product
of the Italian Renascence, practically the earliest encyclopedia or

* Litt. Sen., I, 2 and 4 (1 and 3 in ed. of 1554); Litt. FamiL, IX, 5 (ed. Fracassetti,
II, 18-19). This was once said to be Cardinal Alberti, but is now thought to have
been Cardinal Pierre del Prat, bishop of Palestrina and vice-chancellor of the Roman
church; see Romania, XXXI, 608-9, and C. Segr6 in Scritti vari di filologia, addressed
to Ernesto Monaci (Rome, 1901), pp. 387-98.

2 Invectio contra Medicum III, 1205, 1215. On Petrarch's attitude cf. Corazzini,
Lettere edite ed inedite di Messer G.B. (Florence, 1877), p. 338; Epist. FamiL, X, 4,
to his monk-brother Gerardo; G. C. Parolari's Delia Religiositd di P.P. (Bassano, 1847)
is worthless, and F. Biondolillo's Per la religiositd, di P.P. (Rome, 1913, from Rivista di
studi religiosi) is little better. Petrarch's active hostility to medical and other medieval
learning doubtless partly accounts for the attacks on him.

8 Hauvette, Boccace, pp. 464-65. On his attitude to religion and superstition cf.
A. Graf, Miti, Leggende e Superstizioni del Medio Evo, II, 169-95, and references there;
also Hortis, p. 206. The warning from the dying religious Pietro Petroni brought him
by one Joachim dwelt chiefly on the lasciviousness of his early works, but warned him
to give up his "poetica studia" and abjure "exitialem poeticen illam" (Acta Sanctorum,
29 May, Book III, chap, xi; the source seems to be Petrarch's well-known letter, Epist.
Sen. I. 5 [4 in 1554 edition]; Hauvette, Boccace, pp. 367-68). Does not Professor Court-
hope overestimate the injury to Boccaccio's reputation (History of English Poetry, I,
263)?

* Hauvette (Boccace, pp. 414,447) and recently E. H. Wilkins (Mod. Phil., XVII,
425) believe it was toward the end of Boccaccio's journey to Naples in 1370-71 that
copies of the work began to be made; Hortis (pp. 158, 286, 291-93) says not before 1373.
See also Corazzini, Lettere edite ed inedite, pp. 350-53.

652

THE EPILOG OF CHAUCER'S "TROILUS" 141

handbook of classical mythology,1 and does honor to Boccaccio's
versatility, learning, and disinterested zeal. Its last two books
form the earliest of the numerous Renascence Defences of Poetry.2
Clearly Boccaccio not only apprehended attacks upon ancient
poetry and himself, but had experienced them. He was not merely
an.sjwjiringJJie ^objections of early Christian writers; a man does not
dig up buried enemies? uAgam igitur quod potero, iuuante deo,
ne omnino temerarie uideatur [liber meus] egisse quod fecerit.
Ipse [deus] me eripiat de faucibus malignantium" (XV prooemium,
p. 385). Many have attacked the study of ancient poetry because
of the frivolity and worse in the tales of the gods (XIV, 14,
p. 372). After rebutting various attacks and defending poetry on
various grounds, he comes-akteMtfrthe attitude a Christian should
take toward-the_^lassieal poets. It cannot be wrong, he opines, to
treat of the superstitions of the Gentiles and their nefarious rites,
for if it were, our most holy mother-church would have forbidden it
by a perpetual decree (XV, 9, p. 393, and XIV, 18, p. 376). That
all the gods of the nations are demons had been shown him by the
psalmist3 and had been most familiar to him from his tender years,
and therefore their silly crimes had been displeasing; yet aside
from the matter of religion the manners and writings of certain
poets have given pleasure (XV, 9, p. 395). At the end of the
apologiajn^ frennfnpy m^re and more conciliatory. He will not
deny that it may be well for a boy to abstain from such reading

iHauvette (Boccace, pp. 413-30, 446); Hortis, Opere Latine, pp. 172-99, 202 ff.,
525-42; Voigt, Wiederbelebung d. Class. Alt., I, 169; 11,213,469; Koerting, Boccaccio*
Leben u. Werke, p. 722; Grandgent, Dante (New York, 1916), p. 226. Hortis (pp.
525 ff.) discusses and reprints two earlier contemporary mythological genealogies (very
brief) by Paolo da Perugia and by Franceschino degli Albizzi and Forese dei Donati,
all of whom probably belonged to the circle of Petrarch and Boccaccio. Summaries
and the like were common in the Middle Ages, but no such recognition of mythology as
something worth mastering is known to have preceded. The production of three, to
say nothing of Paolo's lost "Liber Collectionum," about the same time in the same
circle shows how fast the ferment worked. Boccaccio's letter about the De Genealogia
to Pietro da Monteforte is in Corazzini, Lettre edite ed inedite, pp. 350-53. I cite the
De Genealogia from the edition of Basle (1532) ; Books XIV and XV are printed from a
revised autograph MS in O. Hecker's Boccaccio- Funde (Braunschweig, 1902), pp. 188 ff.
One of the early writers named Fulgentius wrote a "Mitologiae," full of allegorical inter-
pretations (Opera, Leipzig, 1898; Saintsbury, Hist, of Criticism, I, 393).

2 See E. Woodbridge in PMLA, XIII, 333-49; and Saintsbury, Hist, of Criticism,
I, 460 ff. Boccaccio wrote a shorter defense of the same sort in the Comento sopra la
Commedia, pp. 123-36, on Inf. I, 73.

» The same in Comento sopra la Commedia, Inf. I, 72 (Florence, 1863, p. 123).

653

142 JOHV S. P. TATLOCK

till he is fully enough acquainted with the Christian religion (XV,
9, p. 393). l He often uses such phrases as gentilium stultitias,
deorum gentilium nugas (XV, 9, p. 395). If he, a Christian man,
has treated of the stupidities of the Gentiles, he has done it at the
behest of his royal patron, and in detestation of their erroneous
credulity (ibid.). The shames of the gentile gods are buried and
damned forever, and if he, a Christian man, has tried to bury
them more deeply [sic] he deserves praise, not criticism (XV, 11,
p. 398) .2 Nothing can shake his Christian faith, and he sets forth
the articles of his belief at much length (XV, 9, p. 395). Thus the
early Renascence bowed at the altar of Rome and said its Confiteor
and Credo. No doubt the attacks were due to mixed motives.
Partly they were the mere floutings of those who had no interest
in this learning and perhaps disliked Boccaccio; partly they may
have been due to jealousy of what was promising to be a new
learned profession on the part of members of the old ones, theology,
medicine, and law. But they were mainly due to an intensified
sense of the peril to faith and morals from an intensified study of
ancient poetry. Even Boccaccio's friend Pietro da Monteforte, one
of the first to see the De Genealogia, wrote in a manner which showed
he felt the book alien or hostile to religion. Boccaccio replies that
he does not deny the book is foreign to Christianity, but calls
attention to the fact that it in detestationem gentilitiae superstitionis
exclamat* The length, the sophistry and conciliatory spirit4 of

* The place of ancient poetry in the education of the young had been discussed for
centuries. See works by Plutarch and St. Basil cited above; Specht, Gesch. d. Unter-
richtswesens, pp. 45, 48, 51; Comparetti, p. 91; also Coluccio Salutati, Epistolario,
IV, 205 ff.

2 Cf. a citation from Coluccio Salutati above, and Hosier's Card. Joh. Dominici,
p. 82, and Richard de Bury's Philobiblon, chap. xiii.

» Corazzini, Lettere, p. 353.

« Unlike Petrarch he is apt to be apologetic about his scholarly works. He wrote
his encyclopedia of geography (De Montibus, etc.) to keep himself from idleness, he says,
as writers of saints' legends say of their works (cf. Sec. Nun's Prol., 22 fl.); a stock
apology, made for instance by the tenth- or eleventh-century copyist of a manuscript
of Virgil hi the Vatican (No. 1570; Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, p. 95). But
the conciliation hi the De Genealogia is far more marked. The convention that edifying
works were composed or copied to avoid idleness probably derived from monastic scrip-
toria. Writing was allowed as a substitute for other manual labor, which was a chief
requirement of St. Benedict, laid down in his Regula, cap. XL VIII. This begins Otiositas
inimica est animae, et idea certis temporibus occupari debent fratres in labore manuum
(ed. Woelfflin [Leipzig, 1895] ; cf. Putnam, Books and their Makers during M.A., I, 28 ff.)

654

THE EPILOG OF CHAUCER'S "TROILUS"

143

these two books of apologia for his interests and for himself prove
it was very expedient to head off trouble by defining his attitude.
All this bears in two ways on the subject. In the first place,
more clearly than ever, pagan poetry was suspect on both religious
and moral grounds, and a sympathetic and full acceptance of it
was not so general that the complete adoption of paganism and the
complete ignoring of Christianity for the first time in a realistic
poem by a contemporary would not be startling or even worse to
some of its readers.1 Everyone would feel an astonishing novelty,
some perhaps a tendency to irreligion and immorality. When
Chaucer wrote the Troilus he was fresh from Italy and may have
been aware by hearsay of the suspicion and debate occasioned by
the new zeal for the classics. There is no reason for believing that
his reputation for orthodoxy was or became frail.2 But he was
twice later to show himself on his guard much as he does here. In
the Franklin's Tale he took pains to create an ancient atmosphere,
and almost equal pains to disavow sympathy with it.3 In the
Retractions at the end of the Parson's Tale, in a tone much like that

1 1 have mentioned (p. 642) something similar in Benoit's partial acceptance of
paganism in his poem, and Guide's counterblasts.

2 There is some reason to think that later Chaucer sympathized with some of Wyclif 's
views, though he revealed the fact only by innuendo (Mod. Phil., XIV, 257 ft.). It looks
as if in another respect Chaucer's intentions in the Troilus had been taken amiss, per-
haps not seriously. In contrast with the praise of woman and love almost petrified
in fourteenth-century genteel poetry, the contrary tendency of the Troilus had dis-
turbed some persons' sensibilities. Hence not only the excuses and amends in the
Legend of Good Women, but also such chaffing disavowals of woman-hating as N.P.T.,
4450-56; Mane. T., 187-95.

» In this latter case it is what he represents as ancient magic that he discountenances.
Moreover, twice in the Legend of Dido, taken from Virgil's Aeneid, after quoting an
example of the power of the pagan gods, he makes a point of expressing doubt or skepti-
cism about it. When Aeneas had entered the Carthaginian cathedral (" maister temple ") ,

I can nat seyn if that hit be possible,

But Venus hadde him maked invisible —

Thus seith the book, with-outen any lees [L.G.W., 1020-22J.
Our author, says Chaucer, tells that Cupid had taken the form of Ascanius,
but, as of that scripture,

Be as be may, I make of hit no cure [1144-45];

at any rate, he concludes, the fact is that Dido made much of the child. Dr. Louns-
bury, in his distinguished 'Studies in Chaucer, opined that in such passages we find a man
in advance of his age anxious lest he be sometime despised by the intelligent for credulity.
I suspect that what Chaucer is disclaiming is credulity merely in regard to pagan miracles.
Having bespoken credence for old books in his prologue, glorified Virgil at the beginning
of this legend, and just told of Venus' transformation and vanishing (998-1001, and
cf. 2249-52), he wished to make it plain that he did not take Virgil over-seriously. Ordi-
narily, as Chaucer knew very well, no reader would have bothered to consider whether
Chaucer believed Virgil or not, but would have accepted the marvel as merely part
of the story. So here again Chaucer seems curiously cautious.

655

144 JOHN S. P. TATLOCK

at the end of the Troilus, he disavows his best works (including
"the book of Troilus") as " worldly vanities,"1 the very phrase he
had used in the latter (V, 1837). There is abundant evidence that
Chaucer often took precautions against misunderstanding. This
excellent example I shall follow. I do not suggest that he made
amends for the pagan Troilus lest the archdeacon should have him
up before his court, or the abbot of Westminster should cross him-
self as he passed him; or even lest he be questioned by his con-
fessor, or lest when he ceased to read an ominous silence should
fall on the room, or a look of distress appear on the faces of good
women. Chaucer, once more, felt the extraordinary novelty of
his complete substitution of paganism for Christianity and its view
of the universe.2 He himself may have felt the chill of this alien

» Not, of course, on the specified ground of paganism, but implying rather worldliness
and voluptuousness. To the list of precedents for Chaucer's Retractions (cf. PMLA,
XXVIII, 521-29) should be added those near the end of the prologue to Vincent of
Beauvais' Speculum Universale (Strassburg, 1473?). Cap. xviii. is called Retractio prime
partis (viz., the Speculum naturale), cap. xix. is called Retractio secunde tercie & quarte
partis (viz., the Speculum Doctrinale, Morale, and Historiale). Toward the end of cap.
six. and in cap. xxi. he uses the form retractatio, but the weight of his testimony is for the
shorter form. In these Retractiones he reviews his works, justifies them or apologizes
for their shortcomings, gives reasons for this or that, and states his estimate of them.
He is clearly following the model or the traditional example of St. Augustine's Retrac-
tationes. If we need look for any one precedent for Chaucer's, Vincent's example is the
most obvious to select among those noticed, though he does not use the plural form
as Chaucer does. Note also the use of retracter in the passage from Deguilleville's
Pelerinage cited above. Pope Pius II (Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini) wrote a letter and
in 1463 issued a bull of retractation for certain of his early views on general and ecclesias-
tical matters. He follows, he says, the example of St. Augustine in admitting his own
shortcomings, which further indicates that St. Augustine started the tradition of writ-
ing retractions. See Voigt, Enea Silvio de' Piccolomini (Berlin, 1863), III, 574-75;
W. Boulting, Aeneas Silvius (London, 1908), pp. 179-81; M. Creighton, History of the
Papacy from the Great Schism to the Sack of Rome, II, 478-79, and Historical Essays
and Reviews (London, 1903), p. 61. On the word retractatio, compare E. Moore, Studies
in Dante, IV, 282.

2 When all is said and done, there is not much in the poem about pagan rites or
about the gods as moving forces. The moving force behind it all is destiny, an idea
familiar to the medieval. But on the surface paganism is everywhere and Christianity
is gone. He disavows more than there is to disavow, because he is heading off not
an indictment but a feeling. The fact that the poem professed to be translated from
the Latin of Lollius would make no difference. His friends would know it was not,
and others would expect medievalizing if it were. I pointed out (p. 627 above) that the
devotional final stanza is unusual, without some special reason, in such a poem. One
thing more in this connection: Chaucer retracts the worldly vanity of passionate love
and pagans' cursed old rites in the form of old clerks' speech. In the next stanza he
begs correction from "moral Gower," a poet of love and of edification, and from " the philo-
sophical Strode," a theologian. (Just so Boccaccio in the conclusion of the De Casibus,
pp. 633-34 above, begs Petrarch to emend what does not agree with Christian religion
and philosophical truth; see also the dedication.) The thought cannot but suggest itself
that the epithets were chosen with reference to the two parts of the retraction, on the passion

656

THE EPILOG OF CHAUCER'S "TROILUS" 145

and calamitous world in which he had lived so intensely, and comes
home to the warmth and. glory of his own faith. Even at some) ^ f *
sacrifice of art he wished to effect a makeshift unification of hisf^'*
poem with everything else in his friends' minds and his own, that it) «•* -
should not be encysted, as it were, by itself. He wished unreserved
acceptance of it, not checked by unessential queries and sense of
strangeness; to domesticate it by ending on a familiar though »**
discordant note.

Secondly, no one can fail to see how curiously Chaucer's short
and emphatic disowning of paganism and giving of his credo (1842 ff.,
1860 ff.) are paralleled at the end of Boccaccio's De Genealogia.
Whether or not it was here that he got the mythology so profusely
used in the Troilus, there is good reason to believe he knew the
work later, when he wrote the Legend of Good Women.1 His con-
duct is intelligible enough without any suggestion from Boccaccio.
But it is not impossible that he wished, besides domesticating the

and the paganism. There is more than idle compliment in the address to them, it is
no mere dedication, and the epithets are not meant as chaff, as some have fancied.
Chaucer never elsewhere put in such a personal request. Ralph Strode as a theologian
seems to have been a thorough conservative, who fought Wyclif's doctrine of predes-
tination as inconsistent with man's free will. Even before Chaucer had inserted Troilus'
long soliloquy on free will in the later version, the latter part of his poem was pervaded
with capricious Fortune and inevitable Destiny. Strode would have been an uncom-
promising critic.

1 C. G. Child in Mod. Lang. Notes, XI, 476-90; Skeat, III, xxxix f.; Lounsbury,
Studies in Chaucer, II, 232-33. The only parallel found for Chaucer's "heed of verre,"
"howve to glase" (T.C., II, 867; V, 469), "vitremyte" (Monk's T., 3562), is the "galea
vitrea" in De Genealogia Deorum, XIV, 18; see Mod. Lang. Notes, XXI, 62. But it
is doubtful if this is the only source. The work is likely enough to have been one of
the "sixty bokys" (L.G. W., Prol. A, 273) in his own library. Copies of so large a work
cannot have multiplied rapidly. If it should prove that Chaucer knew it before his
second journey to Italy in 1378, either it must have reached him in England, or he
must have had unusual opportunities for securing Boccaccio's works, to have got hold
of this one within two years after 1371, when it apparently began to be copied. One
thing more: this paper was by no means begun or continued with the purpose of estab-
lishing further connections between Chaucer and Boccaccio. But it is surprising how
each road led toward him, the "Go little book," the request for criticism, the retraction.
Dr. H. M. Cummings has undertaken to appraise the amount of Chaucer's obligations
to Boccaccio's Italian works (Indebtedness of Chaucer's Works to the Italian Works of
Boccaccio, University of Cincinnati Studiee, 1916). The study was well worth making,
its assembling of fact and opinion is of service, and it contains many good detailed
observations. But its conclusions are weakened by a curious failure at times to under-
stand his predecessors, and also by a failure to appreciate the cumulative force of evi-
dences singly small. A false impression, further, is given by limiting the field to Boc-
caccio's Italian works and disregarding those in Latin. Latin or vernacular, it's all
one, and the more works by Boccaccio Chaucer knew, the greater the probability of his
having known still others.

657

146

S. P. TATLOCK

poem for the medieval mind, to ward off any such disapproval as
Boccaccio and others clearly had faced.

In effect, the Troilus is the first deliberate "local color" narrative
in English, just as the Reeve's Tale is the first dialect story. It is
only natural that these innovations should proceed from the first
and one of the greatest of English realists. Its utter novelty is
enforced by the fact that while for generations it was one of the
most popular of his works, it was scarcely ever imitated. One
feels keenly what a stimulating intermediary between Chaucer and
the classics was his first acquaintance with Boccaccio and Dante.
As Professor Sandys says,1 the chief aim of the later Italian Renas-
cence was the imitation and reproduction of classical models of life
and style. This is how the old poets wrote, says Chaucer, just
after his renunciation of the gods and all their works —

Lo here, the forme of olde clerkes speche
\^ In poetrye, if ye hir bokes seche.

In its abandonment to something new, the Troilus is more thor-
oughly in the spirit of the Italian Renascence than any of Chaucer's
other works, more indeed than anything else in English before the
sixteenth century, with its finish, its lyric manner, its psychological
analysis, its abandonment to worldliness, its attempt to revive the
past, and its doubt about doing so. On the whole, the ending is a
return from the Renascence to the Middle Ages. In this article I
have tried the difficult and subtle task of suggesting what it was
in his own and his auditors' minds that led him to make the return.
The attempt at background and at precision may unfortunately
suggest something harder and more definite than the facts warrant.
But it is difficult to doubt that the Epilog consciously reflects the
age-long dispute as to the right attitude for a Christian man toward
pagan poetry. Such a poem could have been written only when it
was. Earlier it would not have been so classic, and later its classi-
cism would not have been retracted. It remains unique even
among Chaucer's own works. In his later poetry for some reason
he apparently determined to disregard such niceties, and to intro-
duce to his countrymen, so far as they were able to receive them,
the more important traits which he had learned from the Trecentisti,

1 History of Classical Scholarship, II, 1.

658

THE EPILOG OF CHAUCER'S "TROILUS" 147

their combination of actuality with finish. Both had existed in
English before, but hardly in combination. The variety and more
exacting standards so learned made him both more enterprising and
more critical when he later gave rein, to his own personality. But
unessentials he managed with a lighter touch. He never again
took such pains to collect appropriate mythological details from far
and wide,1 or to make the reader feel that for the time he was living
among the ancients. So far as Chaucer departed later from the
Middle Ages it was not in a manner which was to be followed by
the Renascence and its imitators, but in an original manner, which
was to be followed by French and English literature in more mod-
ern times.

JOHN S. P. TATLOCK
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
CALIFORNIA

* This may quickly be verified in Skeat's Index of Names.

THE GRAIL AND THE ENGLISH SIR PERCEVAL

XVI

It is now in order to consider whether there is any internal
evidence in Sp that points to a more or less immediate Irish source.

The plot of Sp relates a tale of strife between two clans. Perce-
val, his parents, his cousin Gawain, and his uncles King Arthur and
the old man with nine sons, are members of one family or clan.
Probably Lufamour and her followers were also related to this clan,
because Perceval addresses them as "kynsmen" (1354). Four
members of a hostile clan are: Gollerotherame, his giant brother,
the Red Knight, and the Black Knight. The Black Knight was
vassal to Golleratherame's brother (1959). The Red Knight is first
named along with the Black Knight as if they were clansmen.1 If
this conjecture be admitted, all of the characters fit into one or the
other of two hostile clans. Anyhow a strife between two clans,
almost between two families, is sufficiently indicated.

Irish society was built up on the clan system, and Irish history is
one long account of feuds between hostile families or clans. Of
course Irish demi-gods or fairies, the creation of Irish imagination,
conform to this social organization. The Second Battle of Moytura
was fought between two semi-divine clans, the Tuatha De* Danaan
and the Fomorians, and most of the Ttiatha are described as members
of one family. This may be a mdrchen plot, but it is the kind of
mdrchen that flourished vigorously in eleventh- and twelfth-century
Ireland and Wales, but was uncommon in France or England, where
the clan system was unknown. The plot of Sp, therefore, indicates
a Celtic origin.

The passage in Sp (2013 f.) descriptive of the club with which
the giant brother of Gollerotherame fights, strikes a note of grotesque
and rather clumsy exaggeration which, in my judgment, is precisely
like that sounded in the ancient Irish sagas. The club was made of

» Wolde he none forsake
The rede knyghte ne fee blake (50).

149 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, April, 1921

150 ARTHUR C. L. BROWN

iron with a head of steel and weighed twenty-three "stone." The
small men that are told of in stories today could "full evilly" fight
with such a monstrous weapon (2018-33). All these points can be
matched in descriptions of giants' clubs which were written in Irish
before the twelfth century.1

The grotesque size of the club is paralleled in the bachlach's club
in Fled Bricrend (§ 91) (ed. Henderson [1899], p. 116, from LET),
which "would be a burden for twenty yoke of oxen"; and in the
clubs of the "Manx giants" in Dd Derga (§ 130) (one of the oldest
sagas, Rev. Celt., XXII, 303, from LET), each of whom wielded "a
long staff of iron as long and thick as a yoke."2

The iron material of the club is paralleled in the iron staves of
the Manx giants; in the iron spit wielded in battle by MacCecht,
a giant in Dd Derga (§§ 87, 148) (Rev. Celt., XXII, 187, 318); and in
the iron club carried by Fer Caile ("man of the wood"), a giant who
had only one eye, one foot, and one hand, and who was accompanied
by a wife with a similar weapon (op. cit. [§§ 38, 136], pp. 41, 309) .3

Finally the statement about the small men of today which has
just been quoted from Sp may hark back to the way in which Irish
tales dwell upon a decline in stature since Finn's time. For example,
in the Acallam, lines 61 f. (Silva Gadelica, II, 103), when some of the
Fiana who have marvelously lived on for centuries appear to Patrick
and his clergy, we read: "The clerics marvelled greatly .... for

1 Griffith, op. cit., p. 110, observed the "odd description of the club" in Sp, and
"hoped to find in it a clue," but he cautiously remarked: " The trouble with any giant's
single combat is that it is very much like every other one: all have been conventionalized."
Griffith was, however, unfamiliar with Irish sagas.

2 Compare (hi documents that have not been proved so old, but which certainly pre-
serve genuine Irish tradition) the Dagda's club, which as he dragged it along tore up
a furrow in the earth that can be traced today, Cath Maige Tured (§ 93) (Rev. Celt., XII,
87); and the club of the Gilla Decair (Joyce, Old Celtic Romances, pp. 223 f.).

8 Compare, in later documents, the club of the Gilla Decair, which was of iron, as was
that of a one-eyed giant in Diarmuid and Grainne, ed. O'Grady (1857), p. 120. Fer
Caile, "the woodman," of Dd Derga is, as I have shown in PMLA, XX (1905), 683, a
pan-Celtic figure. He is well known in Highland tales under the name of the fdchan
(which is no doubt a diminutive of fathach "a giant," see Hyde, Beside the Fire [1910],
p. xxii). Campbell, Pop. Tales of the West Highlands, IV, 298, has a woodcut of this
one-legged, one-armed, and one-eyed giant. According to an Irish tale (Hyde, op. cit.,
p. xxi), he "held a very thick iron flail-club." A similar figure in Welsh with but one
foot and one eye (Loth, Les Mob. [1913], II, 9) "carried a massive iron club." The
Fomorians are sometimes similarly described. This kind of giant, then, appears in Irish
(and Highland) stories from the eighth century to the present day, and is mentioned hi
Welsh. I know of nothing exactly like him outside of Celtic territory. The cyclops
resembled him in having one eye.

662

THE GRAIL AND THE ENGLISH "Sin PERCEVAL" 151

the largest man of them reached but to the waist or else to the
shoulder" of the Fiana, even when the strangers were seated.1

The evidence for Irish origin rests upon the tone of this whole
passage in Sp, rather than upon separate details, for they can prob-
ably all be matched in popular tales from non-Celtic lands.2 It is
not supposed that by itself this evidence proves much, but so far
as it goes it harmonizes excellently with a hypothesis of Irish origin.

In view of the extraordinary changes to which proper names in
the romances are subject, it is doubtless unsafe to attach importance
to Perceval's "lyttill Scottes spere" (191, 195) .» The epithet may
go back to an older time when "Scottes" meant Irish, but we cannot
be sure of this. More significant is the fact that this casting spear
was used in battle. In Sp this dart was the sole thing among the
father's belongings that the mother carried to the forest. The
importance thus given to it seems to indicate that in a more primitive
form of the story it must have been meant for use in battle. Cer-
tainly Perceval uses it both for hunting and for battle with the Red
Knight.

The author of Sp, perhaps, understood that this spear was meant
solely for hunting, and that its use in battle was a blunder of the
boy Perceval; nevertheless it is curious that a romance writer should
make prominent any pointed weapon except the great jousting
spear which was the glory of chivalry. This dart or casting spear
can be best explained as a survival from a prechivalric story that
arose in the days when warriors fought with javelins on foot or from
a chariot.4 It points to a popular and probably to a Celtic source
for the romance.

1 The Celtic flavor of this combat gives some support to the conjecture expressed above,
Mod. Phil., XVIII, 221, that the name of the giant, Gollerotherame, should be explained
as Irish. The first syllable cf this preposterous and otherwise unexplained name (cf . Griffith,
Sir Perceval, p. 91, n. 2; and Miss Weston, From Ritual to Romance [1919], p. 91, n. 2) is, as
we have seen, the epithet applied to a giant who though sometimes a comrade was at
first, and often, a foe and rival to Finn. It is a plausible conjecture that Goll, which
meant in Irish first "blind" and then "one-eyed," was a stock epithet for fabulous one-
eyed giants called Fomorians, one of whom called Balor was slain by Lug in the semi-
mythological Battle of Moytura.

2 E.g., in the story called "Short Shanks" a giant fights ".with a thick iron club,"
Dasent, Popular Tales from the Old Norse (1859), p. 119.

3 In the Bliocadrans Prologue, Perceval's mother says that she is going to Saint
Brendan of Scotland: "A saint Brandain k'est en Escoce," ed. Potvin. 1071.

4 The bleeding lance of the grail castle is likewise a javelin and assuredly not the
jousting spear with its huge kettle-drum-like handle of the days of chivalry. See
Wauchier, ed. Potvin, 20151 f. ; Chretien, 3154 f. This is evidence that the grail story
is old traditional material and probably the oldest part of the Arthurian complex.

663

152 ARTHUR C. L. BROWN

The marvelous elements in Sp, such as the "craftes" of the Red
Knight (561, 608), his " wykkyde armour" (139) that evidently made
him invulnerable to ordinary weapons, and the witch mother who
could restore him to life, are the sort of thing that abounds in Irish
and Welsh traditional tales. They would naturally be accounted for
on the hypothesis of Irish origin, and would be explained as survivals
from the lost source X.

The absence of such marvels from M is clearly due to a desire to
present this story as part of the sober annals of Finn, and should
lead nobody to suppose that X was without supernatural features.
A shows the state of the matter very well. Indeed Finn's exploits
were chiefly against giants and fairies, and the Finn cycle is shot
through with marvelous elements.

Finn is in great part a mythological character. His mother was
Muirenn, daughter of Tadg son of Nuada. Both Tadg and Nuada
are called "wonderful druids, "l which is no doubt only a way of
saying that they were demi-gods. They are well known as chieftains
of the Tuatha De Danaan.2 Both dwelt in the fairy-knoll of Almu,
and it can be no accident that Finn's chief dwelling-place according
to tradition was upon this very knoll. Not only was Finn connected
with the Tuatha De" on his mother's side; long before the twelfth
century, perhaps as early as the seventh century, his pedigree was
carried back on the father's side also to Nuada Necht.3 Finn,
although sometimes said to be of the dann Gaileoin,* is thus closely
associated with, and related to, the fairy folk of ancient Ireland.

Alike in the Acallam and in M, Finn is contending against super-
natural foes. The Grey One of Luachair who made off with the
treasures of Cumall is clearly no earthly character. Irish and Scotch
Finn tales which have been written down in modern times often
assign a part resembling his in the plot to "Black Arky the Fisher-
man," who is a sorcerer and a kind of demi-god.5

i Fotha Catha Cnucha, ed. Windisch, p. 121.

« Acallam, line 5119; Silva Gadelica, II, 225; see J. MacNeiU, op. cit., xlv, lix.

» K. Meyer, op. cit., p. xvii. Nuada was certainly a demi-god, perhaps a kind of
water-deity; see MacCulloch, op. cit., p. 86.

« J. MacNeiU, op. cit., p. liv.

• See the reference to "the black fisherman working at his tricks," pointed out by
Nitze, PMLA, XXIV (1909), 367, note 1. from "The Rider of Grianaig, "Campbell,
Pop. Tales of West Highlands, III, 24.

Alfred Nutt (Folk and Hero Tales, ed. Maclnnes, notes, pp. 425 f.) thought that
folk-tales about Finn which have been recently collected or are still current in Gaeldom

664

THE GRAIL AND THE ENGLISH "SIR PERCEVAL" 153

It is clear that internal evidence in Sp is favorable to the theory
of an Irish origin for the plot. This evidence is by itself of small
importance. It is valuable solely because it corroborates the con-
clusion of former sections that the source of Sp, several times
removed, of course, was of Irish origin.

XVII

We have arrived at the conclusion that Sp and M come from a
common source X, an Irish tale, which may or may not have had

preserve better, allowing for a few modernizations, the old folk-tale of Finn's boyhood
than do the literary modifications of it like M, that were written down in or before the
twelfth century. But since it is difficult to prove that Finn tales have persisted in
Gaelic lands for a thousand years almost unaltered, I here relegate to a footnote all
versions for which no literary testimony of the twelfth century or earlier exists.

An Irish lay of Finn's boyhood, edited and translated by J. MacNeill, Duanaire Finn.
pp. 33, 133-34, assigns to Finn's mumme a prophetic or supernatural character, "Bodh-
mann foster-mother of valor (muime in gairgidh) carried that lad to a secret hill, in the

hollow of a tall ivy-clad tree is nursed that noble Fian-leader Until he is nine

years old he continues to be fed by Bodhmann." " Glais dige (Stream of the Dike) was
the first name given him." Later Bodhmann told King Conn that Finn was the fated
hero who was to break Conn's geasa, and who "was fated not to be christened till he
should see brave Conn." This story, like the Annals and the Fotha Catha, but unlike M,
connects Finn with Conn.

J. F. Campbell (in his Pop. Tales of the West Highlands (1892), III, 348 f.) tells a
Gaelic version of Finn's youth under the title " How the 'Een was set up " : Black Arcan
(Arcan dubh), a fisherman (p. 352), got possession of Cumhail's sword and slew Cumhail
with it. Later the youth Finn fell in with Black Arcan and by tasting a trout that Arcan
set him to cook learned that he had slain his father. Thereupon Finn slew Arcan and
kept the sword. Other Gaelic versions are outlined by J. G. Campbell in his The Fiona
(1891), pp. 16 f. In all of these a Black Fisherman (Arcai Dubh lasgair) is the slayer
of Cumhail. The mumme who rears Finn is Cos Lurgann ("Speedy Foot"), a sister to
Cumhail. Several versions tell how Finn got a magic sword, "Mac-an-Luin," from a
wonder-working Ulster smith by the help of the smith's daughter. (This is evidently a
variant of the episode of Finn's love affair with a smith's daughter in M [§ 15]).

A seventeenth-century story called "The Fight of Castle Cnoc" that connects Finn
with Conn is told by Kennedy in his Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts (1891), p. 191:
King Conn took the honors from Cumhail and gave them to Crimthan, whereupon
Cumhail made war. Conn summoned to his aid Goll mac Morna and "the Ulster chiefs,
Achy of the Red Neck, lomchy of the Red Arm, and the terrible warrior Liath Luachra,
a chief disgraced by Cumhail. Goll was promised the command of the Fianna, and
Liath Luachra the magic Corrbolg (Body defense) of Cumhail, and the Fisherman of
the Boyne, who was accustomed to take in three draughts at the mouth of that yellow-
valed ever-beautiful river, as many fishes as sufficed for a meal to all the forces of Cum-
hail." (This sentence evidently means that the talismans or marvelous belongings of
Cumhail were divided up among his slayers. The Corrbolg, as appears from the Lays
[J. MacNeiU, op. cit., pp. 21, 118 f.], was not a piece of armor but a bag that contained
Cumhail's arms. It is mentioned in M as taken by Liath Luachra. The Fisherman of
the Boyne must be either Achy or lomchy, and since he corresponds to Arcan Dubh of
the Gaelic tales he is doubtless Achy. What talisman he received is not clear. Probably
a magic net or caldron that would yield fish for an army.) Cumhail got with child
Muirrean, daughter of the druid Tadg who lived in Almuin [Almu]. Tadg desired
revenge on Cumhail and a battle was prepared. Cumhail sent a messenger to the Sid
of Maev at Carmain (Wexford) for "the impenetrable coat-of-mail the Corrbolg, and
the accompanying resistless jewel-hilted glaive and spear." (These are evidently Cum-
hail's arms). Tadg, however, stirred up a druidic fog so that the messenger did not get

665

154 ARTHUR C. L. BROWN

•

Finn for hero, but which was certainly more or less immediately
connected not only with M but with A, and the other forms of the
Finn and the Goblin story. We are now in position to decide pretty
well what X must have contained, and consequently we can examine
in some detail how far our provisional reconstruction of a more
primitive form of Sp, given in a previous number of Modern Philology,
is supported by Irish evidence.

1. "The mother, Acheflour, was a fee who brought up her son in a
forest beneath a lake, where fees were his sole companions."1

In M the two " women-warriors," dd banfeindig, who reared
Finn in the forest of Slieve-Bloom are plainly fees, although this
may not have been clear to the compiler who put the Irish story

the arms. "Cumhail was obliged to content himself with the inferior arms furnished
by AoinS the presiding sid-queen of Naas." Cumhail had a presentiment of ill. He
sent his female-runner Boghmin to Almuin telling her to attend Muirrean diligently "and
when my son is born flee away with him and let him be brought up in the most secret
places you can find. Otherwise the wrathful Tadg will destroy him." Boghmin was
obedient and "assisted by the sage woman Fiecal" (cf. Piacail, Finn's uncle in the Fotha
Catha) reared up the son of Cumhail in a cavern on the side of Slieve-Bloom. King Conn
afterward saw the boy, and not knowing who he was, called him Finn, i.e., "the fair"
(cf. the incident with the King of Bantry in M [§ 13]). See also J. F. Campbell, Leabhar
na Feinne (1872), pp. 35 f. Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends of Ireland (1902), p. 85, says
that Finn cooked a salmon for a one-eyed giant whom he slew.

Another version of Finn's boyhood is given by Curtin, Myths and Folk-Lore of
Ireland (1906), pp. 204 f. A druid grandfather orders the boy to be "thrown out of the
castle window into a loch to be drowned on the day of his birth." " The boy sank from
sight; but after remaining for a while under the water he rose again to the surface, and
came to land holding a live salmon in his hand." (This is pretty surely a rationali-
zation of Finn's bringing up in Under- Wave-Land. Cf. a curious rationalization in the
Tale of Manus: A [fairy] nurse threw the boy over a precipice. Later the gardener
found young Manus "playing shinty on the shore below him with a gold club and a
silver ball" and brought him home. See D. Maclnnes, Folk and Hero Tales (1890).
p. 343, and Nutt's note, p. 485.) The grandmother carried the boy off to a forest and
reared him. The king named him "Finn," not recognizing him. He roasted a salmon
for a one-eyed giant whom he dealt with as Ulysses did the Cyclops. This part has been
influenced by the Odyssey but there must have been something in the tale here tha't made
the narrator think of Ulysses, and this was probably precisely the fact that the giant
fisherman was according to native Irish tradition a one-eyed monster. The king was
building a castle but every night a goblin adversary burned it to the ground. The king
promised his daughter to any man who would save the castle, and Finn undertook the
task. He had to slay three fairy men and their witch mother who was the worst of all
and who had power to restore her sons to life. This is obviously a variant of the episode
of Finn and the Goblin in the Acallam but it is a more striking parallel to Sp because
here the power of the witch mother to restore the dead is distinctly stated whereas it is
only hinted in the Acallam. Cf. Griffith, op. cit., p. 64.

An incident similar to that of Finn and the Goblin is in a tale called " The Knight of
the Red Shield," Campbell, II, 485, "A head came in a flame of fire, and another head
came singing. A fist was struck on the door of the mouth of the king, and a tooth was

knocked out The head did this three years after each other." Fire and magic

song are the two powers of the goblin in the Acallam, and in the verses from L U.

i Quoted from Modern Philology, XVII, 382.

THE GRAIL AND THE ENGLISH "Sin PERCEVAL" 155

into its present form. The epithet banfeindig is one used of super-
natural women.1 Their names indicate a supernatural character:
Bodbmal bandrui, and "The Grey One of Luachair." Bodb, which
means a " scald-crow, " occurs as a name for three Irish battle god-
desses. Bandrai, "druidess" or "sorceress," suggests an unearthly
being, as does also the mysterious name "Grey One of Luachair."
These two supernatural protectresses, or " mummi" as they are
called, correspond to the mother Acheflour and the one maid who
brought up Perceval in Sp* and to the Damoisele du Lac and one
maiden, in the Prose Lancelot.

That the sequestered forest in M where the mummi brought up
Finn was originally located beneath the waters of a lake seems pretty
clearly established by two passages in the twelfth-century poem of
Gilla in Chomded: "Seven years Finn was in hard plight, Under
Loch Ree he found fair help,"3 and, " Finn's first race .... into
Loch Corrib from Loch Ree."4

In view of this evidence certain details in M , which by themselves
are trifling enough, may be survivals from an earlier form of the
story in which Finn's boyhood dwelling was under a lake. His
first adventure was to slay a duck upon a lake (§6). He subse-
quently drowned nine youths who were swimming in a lake (§11).

1 Aife an other- world queen whom Cuchulinn fought is called banfennid, Tochmarc
Emire, Rev. Celt., XI, 450, 1. 110; Creidne banfennid is an enemy to Aife in a story in LL.
318c, 23 (Fianaigeckt, xii f.). These are the only occurrences of the word known to me.
Boand the nymph of the river Boyne is in Airne Fingein, Anecdota, II, 2, called banghalgh-
aide " woman- warrior "; an other- world queen named Coinchend is in Echtra Airt, Eriu,
III (1907), 170, called banghaisgedhach, which has a similar meaning; Siomha, daughter of
Coir Luirgneach, is, in "The Battle of Magh Leana," ed. O'Curry, Celtic Society, VI, 33
(1855), called a badhb and a bann-gairgidheach to the people of Goll mac Morna. In the
Tdin B6 Cualnge (ed. Windisch, 4168) Scathach is said to have been mumme to Cuchulinn
and Perdia. In Cormac's Glossary (s.v. Buanann) she is called "Muimme na flan,"
"foster-mother of warriors." .... "Buanann then means a good mother for teaching
feats of arms to heroes." See Fianaigecht, x, n. 2.

2 Long ago Nutt, F oik-Lore Record, IV (1881), 32, compared the bringing up of
Perceval to that of St. George who was stolen and taught by a weird lady of the woods:

" There the weird lady of the woods
Had borne him far away,
And train'd him up in feates of armes
And every martial play."

—Percy's Reliques, Ser. 3, Bk. Ill, No. 1.

»"Fo Loch Riach fua[i]r findc[h]obair," Fianaigecht, pp. 46-47. Perhaps "Find-
chobair" is another name for Finn's foster-mother.

« "Sen Loch n-Orbsen o Loch Riach," op. cit., pp. 46-47. Gilla in Chomded also
says that Glasdic was Finn's name "at the first"; the Lays give Finn's early name as
" Glaisdige, " " Stream of the Dike, " which looks like a reference to the land beneath the
water from which the boy Finn came. However, Kuno Meyer does not adopt this
translation of "Glasdic" (Zeitsch. f. Celt. Phil., VII [1910], 524).

667

156 ARTHUR C. L. BROWN

We can now see that similar traces of an original subaqueous
dwelling appear in Sp. The verse near the beginning of Sp, which
was distasteful to Chaucer's innkeeper,

He dranke water of J?e welle, 7

and which seems to a reader today as it did to Chaucer exasperatingly
flat and trivial, is perhaps a distorted survival of once significant
detail. Perceval spent his youth with the fee of a well or fountain,
and lived beneath the clear water. A distinct statement that Ache-
flour lived in wells survives in our romance:

... his moder }?at wes,

How scho levyde with )?e gres

With more drynke and lesse
In welles, J?er >ay spryng. 1776

The author of Sp, of course, understood this to mean something
rational, namely, that she drank water from wells and ate herbs. At
the beginning of the next stanza, he alters the lines in this fashion :

Drynkes of welles, J>er }>ay spryng,
And gresse etys with-owt lesyng;
Scho liffede with none othir thyng
In J>e holtes hare. 1779

A palpable trace of the original home of Acheflour has here survived.
Another trace is in the passage where Perceval found his mother at

a well:

.... he come to a welle,
>er he was wonte for to duelle

And drynk take hym thare.
When he had dronken }>at tyde,
Forthimare gan he glyde;
Than was he warre hym be-syde

Of J>e lady so fre. 2212

2. "She kept the boy's name secret because, if it were known, he
might be sought out and slain by dangerous foes. A war was in
progress between fees and giants."

We have just seen1 that the Irish stories with their machinery of a
feud between two clans supply the only adequate reason for the
namelessness of the hero in Sp, in Chretien, and in the related
romances.

i See Modern Philology, XVIII, 225.

THE GRAIL AND THE ENGLISH "SIR PERCEVAL" 157

3. "Only a destined hero, aided by the proper talismans, could
deliver fairyland from the giants."

The idea of a destined hero underlies the ninth- century tale, " How
Finn Obtained Knowledge and the Death of the Fairy Culdub."
Oisin and Caelte successively fail in the pursuit and then Finn
attempts it with success. It is hinted at in A, for King Conn's city
has been burned repeatedly by the goblin and the king makes a public
offer of reward to anybody who will save Tara. Finn accepts the
offer and succeeds. It is definitely stated in the seventeenth Lay of
Finn,1 and is a rather common motive in folk-tales. That the
motive is clearly preserved in Sp the following speech of King
Arthur witnesses :

>er is no man apon lyfe,

With swerde, spere, ne with knyfe,

May stroye hym allan,
Bot if it were sir Percyvell son,
Who so wiste, where he ware done!
The bokes says, J>at he mon
Venge his fader bane. 5682

4. "One of the talismans was the "Scottes spear," which had
belonged to the hero's father and which the fee gave to her son.
With this he slew the Red Knight."

In A, Fiacail's spear is certainly magical: "By its means also it
was that Finn ever and always had all his fortune" (p. 145). In
M the spear shows no magical qualities, yet it is emphasized in a
way somewhat out of proportion to its apparent insignificance, as if
it once meant more than it does now. The fairy folk know instantly
that it is Fiacail's spear, and they call it "venomous" (§ 25). More-
over, the pains taken by Finn to recover the weapon, and Fiacail's
remark to Finn, "Keep the spear with which thou hast done the

1 Bodhmann said of Finn to King Conn: " He is the prophesied of old . . . . he it is

that shall break your geasa He was fated not to be christened till he should see

brave Conn," J. MacNeill, Dunaire Finn, pp. 33, 134.

2 According to the " Pate of the Children of Tuireann," Lug was likewise a destined
hero and was brought up in fairy-land. Balor's wife says: " It is prophesied and foretold
that when he [Lug] shall come to Ireland our power there shall end forever" (O* Curry,
Atlantis, IV, 1870, 166). Lug came "with a radiance like the sun" (cf. "fair child"),
and "with his foster-brothers the sons of Manannan from the Land of Promise" (ibid.,
p. 162). The combat between Lug and Balor the one-eyed Fomorian giant, which is told
of in the semi-mythical Battle of Moytura, was perhaps a prototype of Perceval's combat
with the Red Knight. On the destined-hero theme see Mod. Phil., XVI, 556.

158 ARTHUR C. L. BROWN

famous deed" (§ 26), attach to it a certain importance. As has
been noticed on an earlier page, FiacaiPs spear was regarded as a
talisman that had been handed down from generation to generation.
The spear in Sp which Perceval derived from his father is naturally
explained as a later development of this Irish tradition about a magic
spear.

5. " Another was the ring, which he obtained by exchange from
the Damsel of the Hall, and which rendered the wearer invulnerable."

In Sp the power of the ring is described: "Siche a vertue es in p>e
stane" (1858). The magic resided in the stone, and it is probable
that the ring is an addition, since rings are not usual in Irish sagas.
In the original of Sp the talisman was probably a brooch or some
ruder object1 for which the ring is a substitution. Anybody, how-
ever, who prefers to do so is free to regard the ring as an out and out
invention of the English writer. It is not necessary for our argu-
ment to prove that all of the talismans in Sp came from X, but only
that some of them did. Nor is it necessary to deny that the author
of Sp or some of his immediate predecessors may have had consider-
able inventive ability.

6. "A third talisman was the armor of the Red Knight."

The "crimson and fringed mantle" which Finn wore in A, and
which protected him from the fire cast by the goblin, is an analogue
to this red armor. It is, however, quite differently introduced, being
worn by the hero in his combat with the supernatural foe, instead
of being worn by this foe, as in Sp, and afterward taken off and
worn by the hero. This may be a change made by the author of Sp,
but more probably it was already present in X. In M the Grey
One of Luchair, who corresponds in some respects to the Red Knight,
carried, at the time when Finn slew him, the corrbolg, or bag
containing the marvellous belongings of Cumall. He therefore
had possession of CumalFs armor, and may have been thought of as
wearing it.

7. " The fee sent her son out for the express purpose of delivering
her brother King Arthur from the power and enchantment of the
giants."

i Compare the "brooch" snatched by Finn from a woman of a fairy-knoll in M (§ 28),
and the ring and the brooch mentioned by Wolfram at the corresponding place, Parzival,
131, 16. On magic rings see Romanic Review, III (1912), 145, note.

670

THE GKAIL AND THE ENGLISH "SiR PERCEVAL" 159

That Finn sets out for the express purpose of slaying the goblin
is, of course, in the Irish goblin stories perfectly clear. This venge-
ance motive is plain in L, and only slightly obscured in Wolfram.
It has become obliterated in Sp, but its restoration is obviously
necessary to make the plot comprehensible.

The enchantment motive, which is plain in the oldest Irish
tales, is in part perfectly well kept in Sp. Just as Finn in A was
subject to having his royal city of Tara burned every Hallowe'en by
the goblin, so Arthur in Sp was subject to having his golden cup
carried off every Christmastide by the Red Knight. It has been
shown above1 that the enchantment in Sp originally meant more
than this. The best proof of this is King Arthur's notable speech:
In my londe wot I no lordyng,
Es worthy to be a knyghte. 10882

This shows that some kind of a spell must have rested upon the king
and his land (The Enchantment of Britain). This spell must have
been in X.

8. "She controlled the action and, by means of an enchanted
mare, directed the hero to the places where he could get the talismans:
the ring and the armor, and thus kill all the giants. She contrives
the deliverance of her brothers and herself from the giants, and
she rewarded the hero with the hand of another fee, called Luf amour,
who was her sister, or her ally."

That a fairy guardian is not mentioned in the oldest "Finn and
the Goblin" tales occasions no surprise. These are mere fragments
and present no elaborate account of the hero. M, the only version
that relates Finn's boyhood, gives him two [fairyj-guardians (Bodh-
mall is named first), and makes it plain that they watch over him
until the time that he goes into service with the King of Bantry.
However, no control by Bodhmall over Finn's later career is here
indicated, and the motive is likewise almost lacking in the Macgnlm-
rada Conculaind* To account for this we must remember that
these stories are known to us only in a modified form as heroic

i See Modern Philology, XVII, 381.

* Of. also 1061, 1073 f.

» Scathach foretells in detail Cuchulinn's future (Rev. Celt., XI, 452; Archaeological
Rev., I, 303), which is perhaps all that a heroic saga could be expected to retain of an
original control of the hero by a fee.

671

160 ARTHUR C. L. BROWN

sagas, and are attached to historical or supposedly historical warriors.
In these heroic sagas the valor of Finn or of Cuchulinn is the theme,
and the hero's glory must not be dimmed as it would be if his exploits
were shown to be controlled by an all-powerful fee. Her part in
directing the action, therefore, drops into the background, and is
either forgotten or merely hinted at.1

Several statements that Finn was watched over by a fee are to
be found, although not in the stories that we have been studying.
At the beginning of the Acallam no, Senorach, Oisin and Cailte
visit the aged Camha: "the woman-chief and woman-custodian that
from the time when he was a boy until the day in which he died kept
Finn son of Cumall safe."2 The twelfth- century prose Dindshencha^
relates that when Finn was fighting a battle against the three sons
of Eochaid of the Red Eyebrows, Sideng, a daughter of Mongan
of the elf-mounds, brought him a magic weapon.4

Irish evidence as we see, therefore, furnishes plenty of support
for our provisional reconstruction of Sp. This reconstruction may
therefore be regarded with considerable confidence.

XVIII

It is clear that, although we have not found X the precise story
from which Sp stands in a direct line of descent, we have found
something decidedly close to it in M and in older Irish documents.
A fortunate chance which has preserved to us seventh- and eighth-
century fragmentary Irish tales has enabled us to begin our study
of the development of the story, in a way, at the beginning and
not to depend on hypothetical reconstruction.

1 The Irish word mumme is evidence of the early importance of the foster-mother.
For references on the general subject of "fosterage" see Hastings, Encydop. of Religion
and Ethics, s.v.

2 Ed. Stokes, 11. 15-17. Whether Camha ("crooked"?) is another name for
Bodbmall I do not know. Since fairy women are called by many epithets this would be
a plausible hypothesis.

a Rev. Celt., XVI, 147 (§ 139). This is a striking parallel to a passage in the Prose
Lancelot (Vulgate Version, III, 144-52), where a damsel messenger from the Dame du
Lac at each crisis of a battle gave Lancelot a new shield; see Mod. Phil., XVII, 374.

< On fairy control see Miss Paton, Fairy Mythology, pp. 167 f . A very ancient example
occurs in the eighth-century Airne Fingein (Romanic Review, IX [1918], 33), where a fee
Rothniamh (Wheel splendor) on every Hallowe'en tells Fingen the future; and where,
when King Conn wished to get Fingen into his power, a druid warns the king: "That
will not be easy, for there is a woman of the elf -mound who instructs him" [§ 14]).

672

THE GRAIL AND THE ENGLISH "SiR PERCIVAL" 161

Our investigation begins with seventh- and eighth-century Irish
tales and with M, which is an Irish story of the twelfth century, and
it ends with Sp, a fourteenth-century English romance. It is clear
that the story of Sp is of Irish origin and passed in some way from
Irish into English. The exact steps by which it made its way from
Irish through Welsh1 and French versions into English need not here
be discussed. That it did make its way is certain. In calling the
story Celtic I do not mean to assert that all of its elements or any of
them actually originated on Celtic soil, but only that, whatever their
origin before they reached their present form, they had been fash-
ioned by the imagination of the Celts. Long before the earliest
date at which a French Arthurian romance embodying the incidents
existed or in reason could have existed they were already developed
in Ireland. These main incidents in the Middle English Sp and
in the associated Old French romances are therefore unquestionably

of Celtic origin.

ARTHUR C. L. BROWN

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

[To be continued]
i Perceval's epithet "li gallois" indicates that the story passed through Welsh.

673

A NOTE ON ROMEO AND JULIET, II, i, 1-2

Can I go forward when my heart is here ?
Turn back, dull earth, and find thy centre out.

The explanations of this passage given by the editors are hardly
adequate. Furness' Variorum quotes the following from Clarke and
Singer respectively :

Dull earth. Romeo's epithet for his small world of man, the earthlier
portion of himself.

This seems to be one of the many instances of Shakespeare's apparent
intuitive feeling for correcter scientific views than were current in his day.
The idea suggested is of the earth — symbol of the earthly body — at its
aphelion, or the point of its orbit most remote from the sun, returning to it
by the force of gravitation to the common center of gravity.

Other commentators give no other comment of importance; yet the
passage is not clear without further explanation.

Romeo is thinking of the theory that the center of the earth is
the point of attraction for all heavy or earthy bodies, contrary to
light or fiery bodies, which tend to move upward. If a hole should
be driven through the center of the earth from circumference to
circumference, any object dropped from either side would eventually
come to rest at the center. It might be forcibly impelled beyond
this center at first, but, if so, would be drawn back finally to this
resting place. For Romeo, the center to which he is irresistibly
attracted is Juliet; he starts to pass by the grounds of the Capulets
where she is, but is drawn back to them.

That the theories as to the center of the earth given above were
common property in the sixteenth century is shown by the following
passages from Erasmus' "Problema," one of the Colloquies, given
here in the translation by Bailey (ed. 1900), which furnish an excellent
commentary on the lines of the play:

Curio: What then is the natural center of heavy Bodies ? and on the
other hand, of light Bodies ?

Alphius: All heavy Things are by a natural Motion carried towards the
Earth, and light Things towards Heaven: I do not speak of a violent or

animal Motion

675] 163 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, April, 1921

164 JOHN D. REA

Curio: If any God should bore thro' the Center of the Earth quite down
to the Antipodes, in a perpendicular Line, and as Cosmographers use to
represent the Situation of the Globe of the Earth, and a Stone were let fall
into it, whither would it go ?

Alphius: To the Center of the Earth; there all heavy Bodies rest

But a Stone, if it did pass the Center with so violent a Motion, would at
first go more heavily, and return to the Center again, just as a Stone thrown
up into the Air returns again to the Earth.

Curio: But returning back again by its natural Motion, and again
recovering Force, it would go beyond the Center, and so the Stone would
never rest.

Alphius: It would lie still at last by running beyond, and then running
back again until it came to an Equilibrium

Curio: But what is it that makes a Body heavy or light ?

Alphius: That's a question fit for God to answer, why he made Fire the
lightest of all Things, and Air next to that; the Earth the heaviest, and
Water next to that

Curio: Do you think, then, that whatsoever has most of a fiery Quality
in it is lightest, and that which has most of an earthy Quality heaviest ?

Alphius: You are right.

Romeo refers to himself deprecatingly as "dull earth," as being
composed mainly of the dull, heavy element, instead of all four
elements mixed in due proportion. Compare Prospero's "Thou
earth/'used of Caliban, and also Richard III, III, iv, 78, "Thou little
better thing than earth." The words are not to be understood as
referring to the globe, as Singer and others take it. This confusion
has been caused largely by the word "thy," which seems to refer
directly to "earth." What Romeo means by the phrase "thy
centre" is "what is for thee the centre"; to him Juliet is the attrac-
tion toward which he is drawn as heavy, earthy bodies to the center
of the globe.

Perhaps the nearest parallel to these lines to be found in Shakes-
peare is Troilus and Cressida, IV, ii, 109-11:

But the strong base and building of my love
Is as the very centre of the earth,
Drawing all things to it.

JOHN D. REA
INDIANA UNIVERSITY

676

REVIEWS AND NOTICES

Goethe's Lyric Poems in English Translation Prior to 1860. By
LUCRETIA VAN TUYL SIMMONS. "University of Wisconsin
Studies in Language and Literature," No. 6. Madison, 1919.
Pp. 202.

Goethe's Lyric Poems in English Translation Prior to 1860, by Lucretia
Van Tuyl Simmons, is the result of the author's investigations while pur-
suing graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, and is one of the
several valuable contributions to German-English literary relations which
have emanated from that institution.

As the author states, this is the first systematic effort to collect all of
the evidence concerning Goethe's shorter poems in English translation, a
considerable undertaking in itself, in view of the scattered and incomplete
records, and in spite of the several investigations relating to the general
reception of German literature in English-speaking countries. When all the
material was collected, the work finally resolved itself into a bibliography and
chronological treatment of all material which offers translations of Goethe's
poems into English prior to 1860, and which indicates, incidentally, the
general development of interest in Goethe in England and America.

Miss Simmons' rather complete bibliography and thorough discussion of
the material at hand is an admirable contribution to a subject hitherto
neglected, and will undoubtedly prove interesting and helpful to all students
of Goethe, especially to those who are concerned with his recognition abroad.
As she rightly points out, Goethe as a great lyric poet is not known and
cannot be appreciated if the public depends upon the translation of the
finest expression of his genius. One must read him in the original or demand
a more scholarly presentation than that which is found in separate volumes

or in the English editions of his works.

0. W. LONG
WILLIAMS COLLEGE

The History of Henry Fielding. By WILBUR L. CROSS. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1918. Vol. I, pp. [xxiv]+425.
Vol. II, pp. 437. Vol. Ill, pp. 411.

Professor Cross's three-volume life of Fielding is one of the most exten-
sive and distinguished monuments of American scholarship in the domain
of literary investigation. The author brings to his work, not only a wide
acquaintance with the literary and social background of the early eighteenth
century, but also a keen sense of the value of evidence and a genuine enthusi-
asm for the great realist whose life he presents. In spite of minor inac-
curacies and omissions inevitable in so extensive a work, Professor Cross's
677] 165

166 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

study will long remain the standard authority on the life of Fielding.
But it is much more than a critical biography; it furnishes a commentary
on early eighteenth-century thought which no student of modern literature
in Western Europe can afford to disregard. The History of Henry Fielding
is well printed, is adorned with numerous excellent illustrations, and is
supplied with a bibliography and an index.

Caroline Schlegel, Studio sul Romanticismo Tedesco. By BARBARA

ALLASON. "Biblioteca di Cultura Moderna." Bari: Gius.

Laterza & Figli, 1919. Pp. 202.
Goethe en Angleterre, fitude de litter ature comparee. By JEAN-MARIE

CARRE. Paris: Plon-Nourrit & Cie. [1920.] Pp. xviii+300.
Laurence Sterne and Goethe. By W. R. R. PINGER. "University of

California Publications in Modern Philology," Vol. X, No. 1.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1920. Pp. 65.
Paul Gerhardt as a Hymn Writer and His Influence on English

Hymnody. By THEODORE BROWN HEWITT. New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1918. Pp. xiv-j-169.
The first of the volumes here enumerated deals with one of the most
significant of the minor figures connected with the Romantic Movement
in Germany. Although intimately associated with men who thought only
of literary production, Caroline Schlegel (1763-1809) cared little for fame;
yet she may in a sense be called the Muse of German Romanticism. "Tra
i suoi contemporanei ella fu famosa per 1'intensa spiritualita, per la virtu
ch'ella ebbe in grado eccellente di animare e suscitare negli altri 1'energia
artistica; tra i posteri vive in grazia di un epistolario." In Caroline Schkgel
Barbara Allason covers in greater detail the ground traversed years ago
by Haym in "Em deutsches Frauenleben aus der Zeit unserer Litteratur-
bliithe" (Preuss. Jahrb., Vol. XXVIII). With many incidental comments
and illustrative quotations the author reviews Caroline's association with
the Jena group and other Romanticists, her activities in connection with
the Athenaeum, and her theories of art, philosophy, and religion. Of especial
interest to students of Comparative Literature are the chapter on "Shake-
speare" and a portion of the Appendix devoted to Caroline's influence upon
A. W. Schlegel in connection with Romeo and Juliet.

In Goethe en Angleterre Jean-Marie Carre" traces the popularity and
influence of Goethe's works in England from the first translation of Werther
(1779) to Lewes' Life (1855). Without losing sight of the larger and more
significant aspects of the subject in the mass of details presented, the author
interprets in a highly illuminating fashion the changing attitude toward
Goethe's writings as they successively came within the ken of the English
public, and seeks to determine his influence upon Lewis, Scott, Taylor,

678

REVIEWS AND NOTICES 167

Robinson, Carlyle, Bulwer Lytton, Thackeray, Browning, and other English
writers. The history of Wertherism in England, so keenly analyzed by
Professor Carre", has been studied from special angles by Professor O. W.
Long in Modern Philology, Volume XIV. Professor Carry's book includes
only a few specific references to original sources, most of the bibliographical
material being included in a separate volume entitled Bibliographic critique
et analylique de "Goethe en Angleterre" (Paris, 1920). The dissertation is a
model of scholarly method in the field of Comparative Literature.

Laurence Sterne and Goethe is the product of investigations begun by the
late Professor W. R. R. Pinger, of the University of California, and sup-
plemented by Professor L. M. Price, whose excellent bibliography and
survey of English-German literary influences has attracted such favorable
notice. The brochure is divided into three parts. The first and last
summarize and interpret the evidence presented in Part II, in which are
quoted in chronological order Goethe's references to Sterne from 1772 to
1831. Goethe's observations on sentimentality, which constitute the most
interesting portion of Professor Pinger's collectanea, form a valuable com-
mentary on one phase of English influence upon German literature.

In his dissertation on Paul Gerhardt Professor T. B. Hewitt discusses
the work of a seventeenth-century German hymnologist and attempts
to measure his influence upon writers of sacred song in England and America.
Gerhardt's work embodies the best traditions of the earlier German sacred
lyric. His influence upon English hymnology, mostly in the form of trans-
lations and adaptations, begins early in the eighteenth and reaches its culmi-
nation late in the nineteenth century. Of the 132 hymns from his pen, 84
were translated or adapted into English, and the writings of numerous
English hymnologists, notably Charles Wesley, furnish other evidence of the
popularity of Gerhardt in England. Professor Hewitt's dissertation is
accompanied by a bibliography, by six tables of metrical and other devices
used by Gerhardt, and by several indexes.

From Ritual to Romance. By JESSIE L. WESTON. Cambridge:

The University Press, 1920. Pp. vii+202.
Traces of Matriarchy in Germanic Hero-Lore. By ALBERT WILLIAM

ARON. "University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and

Literature," No. 9. Madison, 1920. Pp. 77.
Leuvensche Bijdragen op het Gebied van de Germaansche Philologie

en in 't bijzonder van de Nederlandsche Dialectkunde. XII6

Jaargang. Eerste Aflevering. 1914.

Miss Weston's From Ritual to Romance is a forward step toward the
final solution of the Grail problem in that it adds to the already extensive
list of parallels between the Grail story and vegetation rites, but it does not
solve that problem. In spite of her long experience in scientific literary

679

168 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

research, the author, it is to be feared, has not yet quite mastered the dif-
ference between a pleasantly written essay and a closely knit scholarly dis-
sertation. Miss Weston's hypothesis, though not new, is sound, but when
she attempts to use her data for purposes of argument, she frequently skates
on ice so thin that I hesitate to follow her.

In No. 9 of the "University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and
Literature" Dr. Aron collects and discusses numerous passages in Germanic
hero-legend which he regards as traces of matriarchy. Some of the instances
cited are undoubtedly open to question, but in general the brochure is a
valuable contribution to the study of the influence of custom upon literature.

The first part of the Leuvensche Bijdragen for 1914 contains the last
two (the fourth and fifth) chapters of Dr. L. Simons' study of "Waltharius
en de Walthersage." The author here deals with the important subject of
sources and origins, the former chapters having treated successively of
textual matters, of "Waltharius als kunstwerk," and of "De dichter en de
totstandkoming van Waltharius." Both Dr. Aron's and Dr. Simon's
works are accompanied by bibliographies.

Revue de litterature comparee. Dirige"e par F. BALDENSPERGER [et]
P. HAZARD. Premiere Anne*e. No. 1, Janvier-Mars, 1921.
Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honore* Champion. Pp. 184.

ficrivains frangais en Hollande dans la premiere moitie du XVIP
siecle. By GUSTAVE COHEN. "Biblioth&que de la Revue de
Litterature Comparee. " Paris: Librairie Ancienne fidouard
Champion, 1920. Pp. 756.

Modern Philology welcomes into the field of literary investigation
Revue de litterature comparee and wishes for it a long and successful career
The first number, which has just appeared, contains four articles on topic
connected with Comparative Literature. Especially noteworthy is a discus-
sion of "Litterature compareV. le mot et la chose," by M. Baldensperger,
one of the directors of the journal. Other important features are the reviews,
a classified bibliography of current publications, and a "Chronique" some-
what similar to that familiar to all readers of Romania. Professor Cohen's
Scrivains frangais en Hollande dans la premiere moitie du XVII6 siecle is the
first of a series of independent studies designed to complete the effort of the
Revue to cover the field of Comparative Literature. It treats exhaustively
of "Regiments frangais au service des fitats," of "Professeurs et e"tudiants
francais a 1'Universite' de Leyde (1575 a 1648)," and of "La Philosophic
inde*pendante (Rene" Descartes en Hollande)."

T. P. CROSS

UNIVERSITY OP CHICAGO

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Elementary Russian Grammar. By E. PROKOSCH, Bryn Mawr College. $2.25,
postpaid $2.40. Employs the direct method, the main features of which are an
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The Revelation of John. Is the Book of Revelation a Mystery to You ? By
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CARL ORTWIN
purpose of such a

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A Harmony of the Synoptic Gospels in Greek. By ERNEST D. BURTON
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The Geography of the Ozark Highland of Missouri. By

SAUER, the University of Michigan. $3.00, postpaid $3.15. The pu

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois

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v.18

Modern philology

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